Courtship and Marriage: Why Do We Write About It?

Courtship leads to marriage, and marriage is the beginning of the home, and upon the quality of the home rests the quality of the Church and of the State. Such as are the homes, such is the community.

1924 Hans Manthey Zorn The Lutheran Witness

The following article is the first in a series titled Courtship and Marriage from the 1924 volume of The Lutheran Witness, the official publication of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, by Rev. Hans Manthey Zorn.

Are the homes today what they should be? At a recent gathering of religious and educational leaders in Indianapolis Mr. Wm. H. Remy, prosecuting attorney for Marion County, in which Indianapolis is situated, submitted figures in which he showed that the age at which men become dangerous criminals is rapidly shifting toward youth and early manhood. Ten years ago major crimes were committed by men averaging twenty-eight years of age, and now such criminals are between seventeen and twenty-one years old. Such information is startling, and it points a significant finger at the home. The home, generally speaking, has become unchristian, godless. Physicians tell us the same thing.

Dr. Walter S. Athearn, who has made a survey of religious educational conditions in Indiana, reports that 500,000 children of the State are not identified with any church. This applies chiefly to the Protestants. Jews and Catholics provide better for their children. They look after almost all of their children and give them from 200 to 335 hours of religious education a year over against only 12 hours a year on the average given to Protestant children attending a Sunday-school, while hundreds of thousands receive no religious education whatever. Surely, then, we are not overstating the case when we say that the home of today, especially the Protestant home, generally speaking, is godless.

What shall we do about it? Shall we not bear witness? We need no longer wonder at the record of the divorce courts. The new home, even among our own people, often enough is too plainly built on selfishness and indulgence. Its bond too often is lust. Too many homes are childless, not under the providence of God, but by wicked design, because of the selfish lustfulness of either husband or wife, or both. There must be music and entertainment and a constant program of shows.

Or, instead of a round of amusements there may be disease, not such as comes to all mankind, even in a Christian life, but venereal disease, due to immorality. There is a hospital bill and an operation and only the shell of a woman for the rest of her life. No wonder quack doctors thrive. The lust of the nation nowadays crowds hospitals to the same extent as formerly only a battlefield did.

Too often marriage is merely an episode, a sort of climax in a life of sin. The unmarried mother must have a husband; the unmarried father must escape a court trial. Marriage therefore, is only an episode. There follows more sin and shame and cruelty.

And in such homes — homes did we say? — children grow up who become a burden to the community and to the state. These children often are defective, diseased, neglected, and require expensive treatment, for which the community must pay in the shape of increased taxes. This is the type of children that furnishes a large contingent to the criminal class. Thus many families degenerate. The grandparents were God-fearing people, but their children turned their backs to the Word of God. How many families, even among our own people, have thus degenerated! Sometimes there is money enough to keep the public from knowing conditions that are slumlike.

But our concern is not only about those who become a public charge. Right among some of our people, with what little fear of God is the beginning often laid for a home! With such, engagement, to say the least, is a very uncertain quantity. So loose, so extreme, has become the intercourse between the sexes that those whom all right-minded people must hold to be engaged do not themselves know whether they are engaged or not. Engagement is held in light esteem, and it easily happens that one or the other party to an engagement is disappointed for life, being deceived after the most solemn hopes and expectations and confidences had been quickened.

All this and much more like it brings down the wrath of God and is the ruin of Church and State. There is abundant reason why we should bear testimony.

Indianapolis, Ind.
H.M. Zorn