Marrying Alone: The New Elopement

Forget bowling solo. The new trend is getting married alone.


Since I read an excerpt from David Brooks' Bobos in Paradise for class, I have greatly enjoyed stalking the New York Times Wedding page in all its Ivy League-educated, matching eyebrow height glory (See: the photos requirement). A month or so ago, the Times ran an article on the "New Elopement." An increasing number of upscale brides and grooms are planning elaborate weddings without any guests. A comment from one such couple:

“I wanted the dress, the vows, the flowers and the pictures,” said Ms. Provost, 36, who took the unconventional step of turning the couple’s elopement into a blowout. “But when you have guests, we felt like it ends up being more for them, not for the bride and groom. We wanted it to be for us.”

This sentiment is common for eloping couples. From a wedding blog's profile of another "wedding for two":

"We felt from the bottom of their [sic] hearts that we had to bring the focus back on us, regardless of what anybody else wanted and to remember what we would want first and foremost from our day and that was to celebrate our love for each other, our love for traveling, and enjoying every moment of our day with each other." [Emphasis mine.]

I find this idea of a "wedding for two" particularly interesting for two reasons. First, the radical detachment from any importance of relational ties in marriage and second, the drastic difference between what the Christian's idea of where the focus should be in marriage and the extremes of what this kind of individualism means spiritually. 

"It All Turns on Affection"

Mr. Berry from the second row(!)

My friends and I went to see Wendell Berry give the 2012 Jefferson Lecture at the Kennedy Center last night. His lecture, "It All Turns on Affection," was quintessentially Wendellian and traced essentially every line of his thought from localism to scale to husbandry to homemaking. You can read more about the lecture here. While I have read many of his essays and some of his fiction, I have not yet read much of his poetry. Last night, Bobbie Ann Mason read a rather moving poem, "VI," from his collection Leavings and now I can say that I intend to read more.

The audience made my friends and I laugh a bit. It was a fantastic mix of Who's Who in this very small subset of conservative thought with grungy agrarian-looking types, a few of whom looked like they had just come from camping out in McPherson Square. It's a big tent.

Last Name Project

My friend (and freshman Bible study leader!) Danielle is hosting a series on her blog "profiling an array of individuals and couples about their last name decisions upon marriage or what they expect to choose if they marry." She graciously gave me the opportunity to submit. You can find my post (and my elusive first name) here.

Recovering the "Mistress of Herself"

Girls (Photo from here)

HBO's new show Girls and its creator/writer/star Lena Dunham have been attracting a lot of buzz recently. The show centers around four friends living life in New York City, but it's more grungy Williamsburg than Sex and the City Upper West Side. The main character, Hannah, is also a writer, but instead of an advice column regarding shoes and sordid nonsense, she is (briefly, in the show) an unpaid intern at a publishing company who, at age 24, has written 4 out of a projected 9 essays of her "memoirs," which she has not yet completed because she has to live them first. 


I watched it (it was free on YouTube) and enjoyed it. It's funny, but in an extraordinarily sad trombone type of way that earns its comparisons to Louie. The main thrust of the pilot is watching the characters suffer consequences of bad decisions. For me, more than the career mishaps or the silly things Hannah says ("I think I may be the voice of my generation...or at least a voice of a generation."), the bleakest part was the women's relationships. Hannah hooks up with a deadbeat "actor" who pursues woodworking because it's "more honest" while living off his grandmother's $800/mo checks. Jessa gallivants across Europe having seemingly free-spirited flings with an endless menagerie of foreign men only to find herself facing some unintended consequences back in America. Marnie stays with her boyfriend even though she recoils every time she touches him. New York Times columnist Frank Bruni's March 31 column entitled "The Bleaker Sex" hits the nail on the head with his question: "Gloria Steinem went to the barricades for this?"

Katniss Everdeen: Local(ist) Hero

If you are interested in the depths to which my boredom and procrastination will take me, I posted a silly essay entitled "On the Local Economy and The Hunger Games" at Back Porch Republic, a blog to which I contribute occasionally. You can find it here.

UPDATE: The big guns (well, the gun I have class with) on the Front Porch have given it a shout out here.

Baptists and Catholics Together?

Matthew Schmaltz's article on the "On Faith" blog of the Washington Post entitled "Baylor and Notre Dame: Baptist-Catholic competition, cooperation" was about more than simple March Madness mania, but an increasingly visible coalition. He writes of his New England Roman Catholic background and encountering Southern Baptists for the first time in Oklahoma:

During church baseball games in that small Oklahoma town, Catholics and Baptists would eschew discussions about theological differences to speak about their shared concerns over the rights of the unborn, the removal of religion and religious imagery from public life, the spread of pornography, and the sexualization of popular culture. Underlying it all was a feeling of not being taken seriously in and by American society and culture.

GK Chesterton: OG Distributist

Increasingly, conservative Catholics and those on the opposite end of the liturgical spectrum are finding themselves allies in the public square. Schmaltz cites Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President and all-around Reformed Baptist Extraordinaire Al Mohler's defense of religious liberty in response to the HHS mandate on contraception as an example of this seemingly unlikely partnership. Indeed, the Ethics & Culture Conference on secularism at Notre Dame last November showed the increasingly close ties between Baptists and Catholics. Houston Baptist University had a panel all their own and Baylor was a near ubiquitous presence. (Conference dinner conversation - J: "I read in First Things the other day..." St. Thomas student: "Are you sure you're not Catholic?") Questions about social issues have long brought evangelicals and Catholics together, but, especially in the wake of the unseemly greed and crass consumerism that kicked off the recession, I think more Protestants should rally to Catholic Social Teaching that offers a wholesale alternative to rampant free markets. I can call myself a distributist even though Chesterton finds my fondness for the Institutes a dour tragedy. The author of this article from reformation21.org (no friend of the Magisterium) urges Calvinists to "pay attention to, if not embrace altogether as their own" Catholic Social Teaching, "especially the principles of familialism, subsidiarity, and solidarity." 


My own experience among the small remnant of Catholics who occasionally lament Vatican II at Georgetown, a Jesuit school plagued by varying degrees of nominalism depending on who you ask, confirms the importance of this growing coalition. Clearly, we've had many a heated conversation about justification and purgatory, but have come to find that historical Protestantism and conservative Catholicism care about many of the same things: covenantal relationships over contractual, preeminence of natural law in the public square to reflect the created order, and a desire to see the religious voice taken seriously. Concern for "faith, family, and local community" can bridge gaps without denying the important theological distinctions that divide those on one side of the Tiber from the other. One of my favorite Jesuits calls our little band of Calvinists "separated brethren and sistren" (which we answer with teasing questions about the real meaning of "anathema") and while it breaks my heart that we cannot approach the Lord's Table together, I'm thankful we can venture out in the world to speak caritas in veritate on social issues and in the intellectual world, if not in mission.


Naturally, I bristle at the Catholic argument that the Reformation basically caused modernity and made Nietzsche possible (Carl Trueman has a great response to Brad Gregory here), but that's why we Protestants need some of our own Robbie Georges and Alisdair MacIntyres. We can speak a similar language in the Academy and it is encouraging to see places like Baylor begin to develop a similar appreciation for the interaction of faith and reason within the historical Protestant tradition.

"Coming Apart," Original Sin, and Queen Victoria

This week, I picked up Charles Murray's book Coming Apart due to the flurry of excitement surrounding it in the blogosphere and because sections of it were assigned in one of my classes. I expected it to be a slog, but finished it within two days and very much enjoyed it, even if it did stoke the flames of self-immolation theory.

Subsubtitle: "It gets worse, America"

Like all good books, Murray's is a declinist tale. He pins the downward slope of the American project in the past 50 years on deterioration of four virtues valued preeminently at the founding: marriage, industriousness, honesty, and religiosity. The book progresses from a profile of the new upper-middle meritocratic class, "Belmont," strongly concentrated in wealthy areas called "SuperZips" and isolated from the rougher stuff of life by geography as well as culture, to a bleak picture of the uneducated white lower class, or "Fishtown." While Belmont seems to be going strong in the four areas he identifies as essential - maybe even too strong, evidenced by phenomena like "helicopter parenting" - Fishtown is disintegrating. With the decline of these four virtues in the white lower class, he predicts the government will have to grow to fulfill the roles that are usually natural to communities with strong social cohesion created by healthy marriages, active religious life, industrious workers, and honest neighbors. In his final chapter, "Alternative Futures," Murray looks to Western Europe as an example of what happens when "democratic despotism" lulls citizens into a pleasant, consumerist stupor. He writes:

But the view of life that has taken root in [the advanced welfare states of western Europe] is problematic. It seems to go something like this: The purpose of life is to while away the time between birth and death as pleasantly as possible, and the purpose of government is to make it as easy as possible to while away the time as pleasantly as possible - the Europe Syndrome.

Pass the Soma please. Seeing the Europe Syndrome spread in "real life," British journalist Charles Moore indirectly points to Murray's four virtues in this interview with The European. Most interesting to me was his view of original sin as "comforting" and something that could help Europe out of its doldrums:

The European: You earlier invoked Gramsci. Are you an optimist of the heart?

Moore: Yes, because of a Christian belief in original sin. It is a very comforting doctrine. If you know that you are bad, there is a sense that we are all in this together. The people who think that human nature is intrinsically good have to wonder why the world is so bad. But if you embrace your badness, you can review it and improve as a result. Free societies do that, and it is particularly strong in the Anglo-Saxon world. I have always been bothered by the tendency of contemporary European culture to sweep things under the carpet. One thing that European nations don’t want to do right now is analyze why they are in this economic mess.

Murray does not approach the decline in virtue with an anthropology in mind, Murray retells some field notes from a PhD student at UPenn who wrote her dissertation on the real Fishtown, PA that may require further contemplation about human nature's role in the decline and possible revitalization of American virtue. This student observed that the unemployed white men who would hang out all day on the proverbial "corner" had some perverse pride in their inability to provide for their dependents. She heard a story from a Fishtown resident that at one time, the out-of-work men receiving unemployment named themselves the "Sunshine Club" and printed t-shirts to memorialize their delinquency. Another Fishtown native recounts an incident of a mother who refused to acknowledge her son's misbehavior. On one occasion, she saw her son throw a baseball bat through the window of the car, but kept up her refrain of "Not my son" to 25 eyewitnesses and a police officer. If these anecdotes are reflective of the larger milieu, we are far from "embracing our badness."

And even though Belmont is held up as the functioning - if isolated - segment of the American population, I doubt there is any sense of "badness" among shiny happy Bethesda-dwellers holding hands, sipping lattes, appearing on the New York Times wedding page, and recycling.

Queen Victoria: the picture of industry

To save the American project, Murray invokes both the transition of Regency England to the Victorian Era and the Great Awakenings in the past 200 years of American history. While he dismisses Victorian England as a product of "propagandizing" and tempers a new Great Awakening with the assertion that Belmont-dwellers should not sacrifice their self-interest, I think these two historical examples can give even my fellow skeptics of progress some hope.

Herbert Schlossberg of the Ethics & Public Policy Center published a book in 2000 entitled The Silent Revolution & the Making of Victorian England that traces the intellectual strains leading to the revival of virtue in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Setting the scene with the decadence of Georgian England and following up with the revivalist moment lead by Charles Simeon and the Wesleys, Schlossberg places the locus of improvement as beginning with the church. His discussion of the literature of the pre-Victorian literature brings up a common theme. "Poetry [in the eighteenth century] tended to a sentimentality that was the opposite of the Christian thinking that, as we have seen, lost ground early in the century. It was tied to a non-Christian anthropology that saw man as fundamentally good rather than fundamentally flawed." (Emphasis mine.)

Georgian England, Schlossberg argues, was marked by a decline in orthodox Christianity (Murray's religiosity), an increase in crime (honesty) and drunkenness among men that left them unemployed (industriousness) and uninterested in fidelity to their families (marriage). The following decades, however, saw a revival in the languid Anglican church, more believing ministers, and the rise of public Christians like William Wilberforce who championed virtue. Of course, England's state-church relationship is vastly different than the American situation (thankfully, for both church and state) but the revival happened with a few individual believers troubled by their surroundings, some of whom labored for many years without seeing much fruit. This revival was not primarily a "culture war," but an example of the fruits of individual faithfulness and God's grace.


In his prescriptive sections, Murray advocates reviving American religiosity to mirror the founders' view of religion: useful and necessary for a virtuous democratic citizenry, regardless of content. This obviously makes me uncomfortable and I think it is inconsistent with the nature of past revivals in the West. A knowledge of the "badness" of human nature is not induced by civil religion. We see this failure in our de facto civil religion - moral therapeutic deism - and in the particularly insidious and American brand of prosperity gospel. 

Moreover, perhaps due to my latent meritocratic noblesse oblige, I read Murray's book as a call to the Christian residents of the SuperZips (read: me) to reevaluate where our hope is. Do I truly understand my utter dependence on God for true righteousness in a bubble wherein, as David Brooks writes, the educated class expects to meet God at the pearly gates where He "totes up how many fields of self-expression they have mastered, and then hands them a divine diploma and lets them in"? Even more practically, where do I want to live when I graduate and cannot afford my SuperZip apartment? Would I even consider moving to Fishtown and trust that God makes "beautiful feet"?