Love in the Culture

Our ideas about love are more idolatrous than we realize. That was the introduction's basic point. We are less interested in the God who is love than in making our views of love god.

Later we will turn to how the Bible defines love, particularly in relation to authority. But first we need to get a better grasp of our idol. What shape does it take?

My own generation, which came of age in the 1980s and '90s, was inducted into the idolatry of love through romantic movies and love songs. The film The Princess Bride captured the vibe. It's a sarcastic fairy tale, but it's a fairy tale. Picture two blond and beautiful individuals, detached from all family and meaningful relations, alone in the world, beset by misfortune, yet trading ironic quips and saving themselves by the power of "true love."

Or maybe you saw the teen-bop romance movie Say Anything. If so, you remember the magical moment when the lead character holds a boom box above his head, arms outstretched, outside the second-story bedroom of the girl he loves — a Gen-X version of a damsel in distress needing rescue by her knight. She's restless in her room, imprisoned by an angry father. The music reverberates upward as the singer proclaims himself "complete in your eyes" in a way he could not be through "a thousand churches" and "fruitless searches." The hero's message couldn't be clearer: Our salvation is not in the church. It's in each other. We "complete" each other.

Sting, probably my favorite artist from that era, offered his own praise song to romantic love in the cut "Sacred Love," which says, "You're my religion ... my church ... the holy grail at the end of my search."

Though these pop-culture references are dated, you can pick your generation — millennial, Xers, boomers, all the way back to the generation of The Scarlet Letter and before that — and each has its version of the same story. It's the story of individualism and individualist conceptions of love.

Individualism and Love

Love stories have existed for millennia. Yet, in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, a new conception of romantic love began to arise amid a flurry of poetry and novels. Romanticism offered a vision of love decidedly set against the structures, heirarchies, and traditions of the past. According to this view, romantic love involves not just sexual attraction. It involves finding someone who "completes me." It starts with looking inside myself: "Never mind father's expectations, mother's list of duties, or the vicar's sermons. Who am I, and what do I need? How do I feel about this other person? Does she understand me? Will she help me become everything I'm supposed to be?" Self-discovery then gives way to self-realization and expression: "This is who I am, father. I will pursue her."

On the American side of the Atlantic, one might think of The Scarlet Letter, where love defies the laws of religion, as we thought about in the introduction. Similarly, Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby tries to divorce himself from the past, rewrite who he is, and enjoy love with an upper-class married woman. His obsessive love battles not against religion but against the laws of old money and class. So it was in book after book on the British side of the pond, as with Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights or the salacious work of D. H. Lawrence.

The original Romantics were intentionally reacting against the cold rationalism of the Enlightenment. They wanted to be guided by love rather than structure, internal desire rather than external constraint, spontaneous impulse rather than rational deduction, beauty and freedom rather than efficiency and order. But they remained Enlightenment heirs. They were just as individualistic as those whom they reacted against. In the landscape of the novels, what matters is not who people are in relation to their families or trades or religion. These age-old structures don't define them. What matters is who they are in themselves — what they want, what they feel. Every relationship is a contract that can be ripped up. What's nonnegotiable is whatever my individual heart tells me is true.

Yet what is intentional in these older novels becomes unintentional and assumed in the popular films of my adolescence. Movie after movie presents handsome teenagers throwing off the oppressive hand of parents and teachers who "just don't get it." This is the story of The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Dead Poets Society and Dirty Dancing and on and on. Each offers a vision of love that looks brave and attractive in its defiance. It is awake simultaneously to the inner self and to the mystical glory of love, like a soul in harmony with the cosmos. It courageously casts off all encumbrances in pursuit of its prize, while maintaining an impenetrable moral justification: "I act in the name of love." Who would dare go against that!

These days, our world seems to take this view of love — a love rooted in self-discovery and self-expression that justifies breaking every transgression — for granted. Over dinner, a friend who is my age said to me and my wife, "If two people really love each other, they should be able to be happy. We shouldn't stop them." I knew any direct challenge to her claim would be futile. The claim depended upon a set of moral intuitions developed in culture through decades and even centuries of morality tales. These intuitions were the unquestioned "of course" that needs no argument.

Notice how romantic love in this tradition becomes the perfect vehicle for sinful human beings to get everything they want: self-absorption and companionship; self-expression and moral approval; self-rule and the blessing of heaven; pleasure and an easy conscience.

Ironically, the individualist's love story becomes legalistic. Salvation belongs to those who follow the demands of romantic love. Opponents to anything called love are judged and vanquished. If you are a baker who refuses to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding, for instance, you might find yourself in court. If you are a high school student who says that sex, love, and marital commitment belong together, you will find yourself excommunicated from the circle of cool kids.

Yet Romanticism's priests will refuse to call it moralism. They call it pleasure and happiness. Their story culminates in a bed, after all, two lovers embracing one another, having cast off the world, enjoying all the delights of togetherness, staring into one another's eyes. The camera need not turn to parents or to children, as it never does in The Princess Bride. The couple is the center of the universe. It's Wesley and Princess Buttercup happily ever after, like in most romance movies. Could you ask for anything more?

Well, yes, in fact. The biblical teaching on love also includes a bed. But it places that bed in a garden, where the couple's union ultimately yields a flourishing world of rose bushes and apple orchards and a mess of children's shoes by the front door and swing-sets and skyscrapers. Biblical love creates a far, far bigger universe. It's not stagnant like a bed all by itself. It has forward motion and a story to follow. It's generative. It's fruitful.

Not only that, but the biblical story of love also makes more room for friendships. No one human being can meet all of another person's emotional, intellectual, and spiritual needs. C. S. Lewis wisely remarked: "In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets." I often remind young married couples of this, particularly when they are jealous for one another's time. Wives should encourage their husbands to find good male friendship, and husbands should encourage their wives to form healthy female friendships. We are happier and less demanding of our spouses when we don't ask them to play God for us.

Sure enough, every part of the body needs every other part, says Paul about the church (1 Corinthians 12). And how many parts does a body have? To truly experience love, we need far more than what a romantic partner can give us.

A brand of love that shines the spotlight exclusively on the couple, divorced from all other relationships, perhaps intentionally childless, perverts biblical love into something barren and stagnant. It's a universe that eventually collapses inward on itself. We might even say that Romanticism's story of love can't help but culminate in homosexuality, where a self seeks to complete and complement itself only in itself, its mirror image, two tabs colliding, two positively charged ends of two magnets, incapable of uniting or creating a new life. The rallying cry of "diversity" celebrates the ironic lack thereof in a same-sex partnership.

Biblical love, on the other hand, requires us to move out from ourselves. To draw toward someone different yet complementary. To forget ourselves temporarily and then discover ourselves more deeply. For instance, I am not a woman and I will never fully understand how it feels to be a woman. Yet God requires me to try by telling me to live with my wife in an understanding way. And so my mind must reach, stretch, lean forward in the attempt. I'm forced out of myself, my natural narcissism left behind. This might require self-denial in the beginning, which always looks painful beforehand, but ultimately I acquire a larger identity and a bigger world.

Consumerism and Love

Back to Wesley and Buttercup. If The Princess Bride were real life, we'd know their romance would eventually cool down.

Romantic individualism eventually gets worse. It grows shallow. Relationships are no longer fixed but negotiable, which means we identify ourselves less by whose son or daughter we are, or which village we come from, and more by our choices — like a shopper. The dreamy eyes of the romantic generation become consumer transactions in the next, and consumer transactions aren't usually guided by life's deeper spiritual or moral values. Increasingly, then, all of life becomes a shopping mall, and the individual's beliefs and values in that mall will depend on the appetites of the moment.

When we approach love and relationships as consumers, it's the more superficial traits that draw our attention, since the decision-making processes of a consumer rely on externals rather than on deeper, unseen qualities. Beauty counts more than character. Income more than constancy. Manners more than values. Sexual performance more than fidelity. What are you looking at in a store, after all: a label or an inner essence?

In the romantic love of the nineteenth century, sexuality was thought to emerge out of true love. By the time the sexual revolution occurred in the latter half of the twentieth century, good sex became a precondition of love. Sex became the test at the beginning of a relationship rather than a prize to be won deep into it. A greater emphasis fell on sexual skill and body type. Pornography found an easier market as the public became more easily duped by its fantasies.

With consumerism, happiness results from savvy purchases, and unhappiness and anxiety from poor purchases. The trouble, of course, is that no purchase really closes the deal. The possibility of buyer's remorse always looms. "Should I have purchased the other brand?" "Will a better model be released next month?" "What's the store's exchange policy?"

Consider then how the typical dating process works. A man evaluates his own purchasing power based on what he perceives is valued by women: personality, humor, stature, future prospects. Acting on this self-appraisal, he makes the best purchase he can according to whichever traits he most values in women: Intelligence? Beauty? Family background? In a market with ample supply, he can be more particular in his demands. It's not just beauty he's looking for; it's a particular body type. One sociologist writes, "Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values." We're more concerned about who loves us, than we are about loving. And there's nothing to prompt a consumer to ask, am I desiring the right things?

An outgrowth of individualism and consumerism is a fear of making binding commitments. Sure enough, Americans today are less likely to join clubs, associations, and civic groups than their historical predecessors. We're marrying later and divorcing more often. We're also changing jobs and careers more often. Whenever a relationship becomes inconvenient or demands too much, it's left behind.

People today worship not just the god of love but the god of options. Individuals reach their late twenties and even thirties uncertain of what they want to be "when they grow up," so the experts give lectures on "delayed adolescence." How many men (including myself) have I counseled through the agonizing decision of whether to pursue this or that woman? After all, another woman could come along next month who's even better. Commitments bind us. Commitments are threatening. They are freedom curtailing. They are pleasure postponing.

As a result, the idea of commitment is removed from the ingredients of love. Parents justify their divorce because it's "most loving for the children." Higher percentages of couples cohabitate, claiming their love doesn't "need" a marriage license. Or, while they love each other today, "who knows about ten years from now?"

Yet stop and ask the cohabiting couple who in this present moment, really, are they most loving and protecting? Is it not themselves? Why else would they keep their future options open?

The love we idolize focuses on self-discovery, self-realization, self-expression. It focuses on externals. It looks for a bargain. It fixates on the present moment, divorcing the past and ignoring the future. It excuses itself when the going gets tough. It is, in all these ways and more, childish. It is also, in the final analysis, selfish.

Tribalism and Love

In recent decades, many people have reacted to the individualism of Western culture by emphasizing their group membership, particularly if that group has experienced injustice and oppression. Individualism and the political philosophy behind it, liberalism, are really just a mask for white male preferences, said a number of feminists and minority-rights theorists beginning at least as early as the 1960s. Our political institutions, these writers reasoned, need to give more attention to what it means to be female, or black, or Latino.

In general, the emphasis on group identity has helped bring the history of injustice and oppression against these groups to the forefront of today's political conversations. Exposing injustice is a good thing. Notice, though, that love in this conversation gets tied to the group. And this has risks and benefits. You are expected to show love for the group member not merely by regarding him or her as an individual. Instead, you affirm each member of that group as a sharer in the injustices done to that group.

Let me illustrate. Many whites pride themselves on being color blind. "I don't think of you as black. I just think of you as my friend." The black man might then understandably reply, "If you're my friend, you'll ask me what my experience has been like as a black man in this country." A friend once said that to me. He rightly identified a failure to love my friend well.

What such a reply also suggests is that it's easy for members of the majority like me to give preferences to our group but not realize it. Being in the majority allows you to treat your own cultural preferences as simply the norm or as objective, as natural as a fish in water.

Power disparities exist between different groups. And so love should account for the existential realities of group membership and injustice, particularly among the poor or downtrodden. Sometimes I wonder if, in the new heavens and earth, we'll discover that the saints who belonged to one oppressed group or another will find themselves ranked first, based on Jesus's promise that the last shall be first. And those of us who were first in this world will, on being ranked last, rejoice as much as any over the inversion.

Yet if individualism risks making the individual god, we can also make the group a god. Group identity, too, can be idolatrous. That's the implicit idea behind the label tribalistic. White supremacy is an obvious illustration. But there are many other forms. In general, we can say that group identity risks idolatry when I love the members of my group to the exclusion of other groups. I'm at risk when another person's group membership wholly determines my perspective on her, as if that were the most important thing about her and not the fact that she was created in God's image. I'm at risk when I forget what unites humanity and can only see what divides us. I'm at risk when I insist you love me on my group's terms. I'm at risk when I'm certain my tribe is always right and yours is always wrong, and I'm unwilling to listen to criticisms of my group.