Singleness and the Church, Part II

A “plausibility structure” is the intricate network of symbols, social supports and embedded ways of communicating that a culture has in place to make a certain way of life seem “plausible” to its members.

Take marriage as an example.  Lifelong monogamy does not "come naturally” to the species, one might argue, but societies that enjoin their members to practice it have a whole slew of things in place to make this way of life seem “plausible.” We have sacred ceremonies to celebrate it. We make laws to govern it. We have an elaborate system of record keeping to keep track of who has entered into it. We tell stories which idealize it, and so on.

For centuries, in fact, we have maintained a rather sophisticated “plausibility structure" to make married monogamy seem “plausible,” to nip-in-the-bud any nay-saying voices that might hear the idea and say: “Really? One partner, exclusively, for life? Who could possibly?” (Indeed, the notable decline of interest in traditional marriage in modern day Canada is linked, I would argue, to a steady erosion of the “plausibility structures” that once encouraged Canadians to believe that marriage was a viable path to walk).

If marriage seems too loaded an example, try American gun-control.  No wonder meaningful gun-control laws feel so impossible in America, when 1 in 4 of its eligible citizens owns a gun, when the country itself own almost half of all the citizen-owned guns in the world, when there are 25 times more gun homicides than in any other comparable country, when the right to own a gun is ostensibly encoded in the founding documents of the nation, when a steady stream of entertainment media glorifies gun violence, and so on.  How do you convince citizens to accept restrictions on their freedom to own firearms in a nation where there are all kinds of “plausibility structures” in place to encourage guns, and next to no structures in place to make effective gun control sound “plausible”?

The concept of “plausibility structures” is crucial for any Christian community that wishes to take seriously the Bible’s perspective on sex, and authentically encourage its unmarried members to walk a path of abstinence and celibacy. Most of churches I’ve experienced have been this way. They taught their members that sex ought to be experienced only within the bonds of marriage, and taught by extrapolation that unmarried Christians ought to follow a path of abstinence. Yet such churches had no more “plausibility structures” in place to encourage celibacy, than America has for gun control.  That is to say: there was nothing there to make celibacy appear “do-able,” other than the guilt, shame, or idealization that swirled around sex-talk generally.

Instead, these churches focused on the family, and preached sermon series on how to have a godly marriage, and celebrated newly-weds, and provided little support for divorcees, and targeted “young families” as their preferred ministry demographic (either implicitly or explicitly).  None of these things communicates that “we actually think singleness is a very good thing, a good way to follow Jesus, a way of life that is rich, and important, and, especially, plausible.”

I first learned about "plausibility structures" from Christian Sociologist Jenell Paris-Williams.  She suggests that churches fail in their calling if they do not intentionally make celibacy a “plausible” option for Christian singles, and that if a church wishes to promote a traditional sexual ethic it has an especially poignant obligation to build "plausibility structures" around that ethical teaching.  She argues that the extent to which one’s community presents a life-style choice as “plausible” greatly influences the likelihood one will choose it, and be successful in pursuing it. Her wisdom on this matter merits an extended reference, I think:

Celibacy is surely a strenuous spiritual path, but today the cost of celibacy is unreasonably and unnecessarily high. When it comes to moral teachings about sex outside of marriage, we isolate sexual pleasure from all the other good things that are connected to sexual relationships. People are commanded to abstain from sexual intimacy, but no one addresses how abstention may also limit the person’s access to family, touch, children, financial stability and so on. It’s hard to be a celibate person in an unchaste church whose broader context is an unchaste society. In striving for moral virtue, the celibate also bears the church’s collective sin of failing, in a highly sexualized social context, to make a counterculture in which celibacy is plausible. (Jenell Paris Williams, The End of Sexuality (Downers Grove, Il:  InterVarsity, 2011), 136.)

Wesley Hill, a gay Christian who has chosen to live the path of celibacy, writes extensively on this theme.  In Washed and Waiting, he makes the poignant observation that the church was meant to be God’s sanctified remedy for human loneliness, God’s “compensation” to celibate Christians for their sacrifice of sexual intimacy (see Mark 10:29-30).  He challenges Christians to recognize that “the New Testament views the church—rather than marriage—as the primary place where human love is best expressed and experienced” (Wesley Hill, Washed and Waiting (Grand Rapids:  Zondervan, 2010), 111).

If the church is going to live into its identity as “the primary place where human love is … expressed and experienced,” it will have to take far more seriously the extent to which it supports, encourages, and values the single people in its midst.  It will have to ask hard questions about how authentically and how practically it serves as God’s “compensation” to celibate Christians for the sacrifices they have made to pursue this particular path of discipleship.  If it did, I think, it would find itself building structures in its life together that makes the path of celibacy not simply “plausible” for those who walk it, but rich, and rewarding, and life-giving.