The Church Cannot Remain Silent on Cohabitation

By Timothy S. Goeglein

As faithful Lutherans, we need constantly to guard against those forces seeking to undermine our faith — particularly the faith of our young people. We must send clear and consistent messages regarding issues of biblical sexuality to help them stand up to and see through the lies of the world around them.

Unfortunately, too many Christian young people are buying into the lie that it is just fine for couples to cohabitate before marriage as long they intend to tie the knot sometime in the future. In some cases, they feel it’s OK to live together even if they do not intend to marry. The Pew Research Center, The Institute for Family Studies and other research organizations have, over the last decade and a half, released a series of alarming statistics regarding the acceptance of — and deliberate choice to participate in — cohabitation before marriage by evangelical Christians, including Lutherans.

For instance, as long ago as 2019, Pew reported that 58% of white evangelicals of all ages saw cohabitation as acceptable if the couple eventually planned to marry. As startling as that statistic is, the situation is more sobering among young evangelicals. In 2012, a General Social Survey found that more than 40 percent of evangelicals aged 20–29 thought cohabitation was acceptable even if they had no plans to marry. In addition, David Ayers, writing for the Institute of Family Studies in 2021, found that nearly half of evangelical Protestants (with whom Lutherans are usually grouped in demographic studies) aged 15–22 who were not presently cohabitating or married believed they would likely cohabit with a member of the opposite sex sometime in the future. Analyzing the available research, Ayers also found that 65% of evangelicals aged 23–44 who had already cohabitated planned on doing so again.

If all these data points sound a little outdated — and they are — it’s largely because “Christians embrace cohabitation” doesn’t even seem headline worthy anymore. The social science is settled: Even among conservative, Bible-confessing church bodies like the LCMS, cohabitation has now been accepted as “normal” by at least half of all churchgoers.

This is tragic not only for the young people involved but also for the witness of the church. When Christians turn a blind eye to sexual immorality — and make no mistake, cohabitation as most people practice it is sexual immorality — they often up becoming cheerleaders for it, as those in liberal mainline denominations have already demonstrated. Rather than transform the culture, many who call themselves Christian have chosen to conform to it instead, all in the name of “relevance,” “tolerance” and “love.”

When we accept and even affirm cohabitation instead of encouraging young people to follow God’s design for marriage, the church ends up being one of the main cultural wrecking balls to the institution, accelerating the continued fragmentation of the family — the stabilizing factor in all civilizations, regardless of faith.

Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family, has written, “It is up to us to show a fraying culture that marriage is so much more than ‘just a piece of paper’ or an association of any two or more persons who profess to love each other. It is a sacred union of a man and a woman that confers myriad benefits on the spouses, their children, and society at large — benefits that cannot be replicated by any other relationship. I would go so far as to say a society cannot flourish, or even long survive, without stable marriages at its core.”

It has been stated many times that the downfall of every great civilization, as well as every institution, comes from within — not from aggressive external attacks but from moral compromises made along the way that slowly weaken its foundation. That is true of churches as well.

As Lutherans, we need to resist making moral compromises ourselves and actively encourage our young people not to make them, either — for their sakes, for the sake of our church and for the sake of the Gospel. When the church gets laryngitis on moral issues like cohabitation, it loses its voice on all other issues as well.

It is time for us no longer to sit on the sidelines while our children learn about marriage from the culture instead of from the church. Netflix and TikTok should not be what informs their decisions; nor should the financial convenience of shared living expenses, an excuse frequently used by cohabitating couples to justify their choices.

Instead, we must model, promote and emphasize the beauty of marriage as God’s design for human relations and a living picture of Christ and the church — not just another item on the “adulting” to-do list to tackle when (or if) we get around to it. We must do all we can to preserve and, where necessary, restore a culture in our churches that encourages marriage and discourages living together before marriage. That starts by ending our silence and engaging in candid conversations with young people before they begin cohabitating, not just afterwards.

They will flourish, and so will the churches they fill.

Cover image: “A Brittany Wedding” by Frederick Goodall, 1822–1904.