Carol Kurivilla has an article on HuffPo about the acceptance of child marriage among fundamentalists and some wider Evangelical Protestant groups. The description of “grooming” young girls to become wives of older men makes for some disgusting reading. I have to say, I was shocked.
I grew up among evangelicals, although before the rise of the Religious Right. Yes, I left long ago to become a liberal Protestant, but there was NOTHING like this in the Evangelicalism I knew. This sounds like something out of the 18th or 19th centuries with the preferences for men to marry older after they can support a family and marrying the women young both to maximize childbearing years and give less time for possible sex outside of marriage.
What the hell? Where is the feminist evangelicalism of the 1970s? The evangelical peace movement? I knew the Religious Right had greatly changed Evangelical Protestantism, but I had no idea about this garbage. My stomach is turning. Also, I looked up the “purity dances” mentioned in the article and it looked like incest—at least spiritual incest if not actual incest. My GOD those were creepy father-daughter interactions!
If this gross theology has taken hold of evangelicalism to this degree, no wonder so many AL evangelicals are shrugging at stories of Roy Moore dating teens. Holy Shit, this is gross.
Honestly, this is light years from the “Evangelicalism” that I knew in the 1970s. We dated, folks. A 30 year old man dating a teenaged girl would be turned into the police!
I have to go puke, now.