What Christians Talk About When They Talk About Marriage: A Roundtable on Courtney Ann Irby’s Guiding God’s Marriage

How do Christians understand the question, “What makes a good marriage?” How do evangelicals and Catholics alike frame this question and how do they answer it in our contemporary moment, when Christians are concerned that the institution of marriage is on life support? And, what does studying these questions reveal about how Christians navigate gender, sexuality, and intimacy as they practice their lived religion? Courtney Ann Irby’s insightful new book *Guiding God’s Marriage: Faith and Social Change in Premarital Counseling* (New York University Press, May 2024) answers these questions and more through rich qualitative analysis. This roundtable panel gathers sociologists of religion and historians of religion, gender, and sexuality to amplify its important contributions to the sociology of religion specifically and the study of religion more broadly. *Guiding God’s Marriage* examines how religious communities transmit messages about shifting views on intimacy. As a short-term ministry operating outside of the daily lives of congregations and their members, premarital counseling necessitates that Christian communities make decisions about who can best speak on matters of faith and marriage, as well as what are the most critical insights to share to ensure successful and faith-filled relationship. Premarital counseling, thus, offers a unique opportunity to consider how religious communities have responded to cultural changes in marriage, gender, sexuality, and intimacy. Motivated by concerns about divorce and a desire to ensure couples have happy and faith filled marriages, marriage preparation programs attempt to teach couples the principles for how to have a good and godly marriage. The book tells the story of how Christian communities developed and continue to offer premarital counseling as a form of emotional, spiritual, and relational socialization. It argues that their teaching of a “covenant rhetoric” offers an interpretative framework to make sense of this increased contingency in marriage culture, establishes feeling rules to emotionally identify a successful and loving relationship, and sacralizes relationship skills to ensure people work against the threat of divorce. It reveals how Christians have contributed to the rising therapeutic culture and the ways that psychological insights have been sacralized as part of God’s vision of a healthy marriage. Through archival research as well as firsthand observations of four marriage preparation courses—two Protestant and two Catholic—along with seventy interviews with participating couples and leaders of these and other programs, Irby brings attention to the understudied and widespread phenomenon of Christian premarital counseling. *Guiding God’s Marriage* is among the first to study this popular practice, which is an important site for teaching and learning what it means to be in a Christian marriage and how to fulfill Christian gender roles. In doing so, she bridges conversations in the sociology of gender and sexuality, the sociology of religion, American family life, and American religions, specifically tying together the social impact and process of shifts in American religion and marriage, which are often examined separately. This roundtable seeks to further bridge the gaps that Irby is filling by bringing together scholars who might not otherwise have the opportunity to collaborate on their shared interventions. In doing so, our aim is to forge the intellectual bonds that Irby has identified between sociologists and historians, and between scholars of religion and scholars of gender, sexuality, and family life. The panel includes scholars at various ranks. There will be five panelists followed by a response from Irby. The first three panelists will broadly situate Irby’s book in the fields of sociology and American religion. The first panelist is a sociologist of religion, education, culture, and theory who has written qualitative sociological studies comparing the lived practices of distinct religious groups. He will draw out Irby’s theoretical framings in sociology and her impressive merging of sociologies of religion and gender. The second panelist is a historian of religion, health, and sexuality who has published on Christianity and sex education. She will focus on how *Guiding God’s Marriage* fits into the history of American religious attitudes toward sexuality broadly. The third panelist is a scholar of religion focusing on purity culture, especially of American adolescents. She will position Irby’s work in the context of purity culture historically, identifying how marriage counseling plays a key role in continuing purity logics. The next two panelists will think specifically about Irby’s writing on two central religious populations: Catholics and evangelicals. The fourth panelist is an ethnographer of Catholicism and gender with an expertise in masculinity, material culture, and lived religion. She will situate Irby’s contributions to conversations on Catholic gender roles in a broader history and historiography of Catholicism. The final panelist is a leading scholar of religion, gender, sex, and embodiment whose recent work is on the history of American evangelical sex manuals. She will especially connect Irby’s contemporary work to the long history of evangelicals making community and understanding God through sex and marriage, tying together the various themes from throughout the panel. Ultimately, this roundtable will help illuminate what Christians talk about when they talk about marriage, and what the varied fields that the Sociology of Religion Unit unites can learn from those conversations.