Rejoice, ye singleton, for this week, thou art truly blessed. On Wednesday, the Church of England released the findings of its report on families and households and one of the key messages, endorsed by the archbishops of Canterbury and York, is that it’s about time we honoured the state of singleness.
The commission, which has consulted over the past two years, “believes strongly that single people must be valued at the heart of our society” and wants the church to celebrate them.
As someone who has been to plenty of churches where the weekly notices consist largely of weddings and newborns, I welcome this news. There’s no grudge – I’m all for sharing in other people’s joy. It’s just that I’ve noticed, over the years, that the only life events that get announced by the vicar and applauded by the congregation are the ones that involve coupling and procreating.
A change in attitude is welcome, indicative of a wider shift in both the spiritual and the secular realm. Here is a tacit acknowledgment that the Anglican church – along with plenty of faith communities, and wider society itself – has been a strong and not-so-silent endorser of a hierarchy of being that elevates families and couples, and regards the single life as a “lesser” one. Haven’t found a partner? You’re probably just not praying hard enough.
While church teaching and Christian culture might seem niche and irrelevant to many in our 21st-century world, we’re all affected by their legacy. Centuries of institutionalised religion have reinforced the idea that the journey to maturity is incomplete without the experience of marriage and babies. And this despite the fact that Christianity’s central figure was single. On his death, Jesus was unmarried. Without that fact, Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code conspiracy theories would never have proved such a page-turner.
Theologically, the “new” church messaging on single living isn’t as radical as it sounds. Christianity actually has a decent track record of honouring singleness over the past two millennia, from the calendar of saints (many of them virginal women) to the Catholic tradition of priestly celibacy. St Paul, the New Testament’s most powerful voice and the early church’s foundational figure, writes in his first letter to the Corinthian converts that “it is good to stay single” and that he wishes everyone had his gift for celibacy. Plenty of biblical scholars have argued from this that marriage is a gift from God for those who can’t be as devoted as Paul was to the spiritual life.
In England, however, singleness took a kicking after the Reformation, when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and both the vocational and literal spaces that unmarried people had occupied in society disappeared. Protestantism emphasised marriage and procreation until they became the highest of human callings. Church teaching has reflected that priority ever since, either through the prism of Victorian imperialism or the more contemporary conservatism some evangelical theologians, who reinforce patriarchal family structured through the concept of “male headship”.
Which means a church community, which is meant to act as family, can sometimes be the very arena in which singleness becomes an alienating and lonely experience. I once went to a church conference where a teaching seminar for single women encouraged us all to be more like the Old Testament Ruth, who lay submissively at the feet of her kinsman Boaz’s bed until he claimed her as his bride. I never followed through on this method, so I can’t entirely disprove its efficacy. But I haven’t forgotten how sad the suggestion that I somehow wasn’t humble or willing enough to find a husband made me feel. It isn’t just parishioners who sometimes feel marginalised – even single priests can find themselves treated with a lack of grace and dignity.
One first-time curate I know took a job that came with a two-bedroom house (priestly stipends are tiny, so it’s standard for a post to include accommodation). After accepting, she was informed by her diocese that, since she wasn’t married, she would be expected to share it with a stranger of their choosing. It was an infantilising suggestion – happily her protest was heard, and the arrangement was withdrawn.
The irony about the way church life has undervalued single people is that they often play such an active role in the community – especially the women. Barbara Pym paid tribute to these eponymous “excellent women” in her novels, spinsters of all ages, who play the organ during the service, or make the tea after it, or knit the items that will be sold at the vicar’s jumble sale. Without distracting obligations towards children or partner, they have more time to give to others, and they give it willingly.
Presumably, the writers of the Church of England report are aware of another sociological phenomenon too: the gender imbalance in the makeup of UK congregations. Twelve years ago, a report by the Christian NGO Tearfund revealed what female churchgoers had known instinctively for far longer. There are considerably more women than men in the pews – 65% compared with 35%. At the time, when commentators wondered what this meant for the church’s still male-dominated leadership, my single female friends were far more concerned about its effects on the Christian dating pool.
So, I look forward to whatever general honouring and bespoke support the Church of England has planned for us single folk. Perhaps next Sunday, after reading the banns of marriage, my vicar will intone that Emma John, spinster of this parish, is planning to buy her first electric car, and if any present know of any cause why a Nissan Leaf is a bad idea, they are to declare it now.
• Emma John is a freelance author and writer. Her book Self Contained: Scenes from a Single Life is published by Octopus
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