The Bad Theology of Christian Internet Dating – Or What I Thought About when I Heard a Commercial for Christian Mingle.com and Claims of Divine Providence

Internet dating sites are big business. And if there is a variant offering a pure, wholesome, and morally grounded experience, you can believe there is an entrepreneuring Christian out there who will exploit the opportunity.

Find the one God intended for you. The tag line is catchy and resembles a divine ideology concerning the providence of God and his care for you. In this way, Christian Mingle.com ensures not only that signing up with their service is a biblically based venture, but also that they make a lot of money from it.

But is that tall, dark, and handsome stranger an answer to your prayers, or an answer to their pocketbooks? The question might seem unremarkable given the barrage of media that comes at us, the claims of false advertising, and the competing claims of other contenders in the Internet dating business who all tantalize us with result-driven dating solutions.

I know only one person who tried an Internet dating site, and the result was less than heavenly. But this doesn’t stop the thousands who are doing it. As a theologian, however, the question I have is whether there are problems with Christian mingles.com’s theology. Let’s explore some of the implications of their claims and measure it against a theological critique.

There are some definite problems with this theological stance of Christian mingle, from one of ignorance to downright deception. Let’s begin with the claim that God has a right partner for you. On the surface this sounds great because it draws in people of all persuasions. The psychology of setting up such a site means that not only are your diehard, cross-wearing Christians immediately attracted like moths to the flame, but wayward, nominal, and even those who are teetering on the faith can feel reinvigorated because, despite the name of the forum, it treats no one with any distinction. This open-invitation approach might be good for business (because hey, we all love God, right?) and it certain might spur people forward who have a less-than-moral take on their own faith walk, but in treating all people as one under Christ, there will inevitably be those with varying shades of Christ-likeness who will feel offended, maybe even duped, when Mr. Right tries to get to second-base on the first date! While I’m sure this is a contentious problem for all dating sites, it seems to be even more diabolic when a dater thinks that Christian mingle has her best interest in mind, only to have a date go horribly wrong. Not very “Christian” of them. But hey, are they really their brother’s keeper?

This isn’t even the real issue. From a theological standpoint, Christian mingle.com aims to capitalize on an ideological claim that should give any Christian pause. But using providence as the key to one’s interpretative matrix creates all sorts of funky scenarios in which the providence of God conflicts with other character or faith traits we are supposed to cultivate. For example, if God is a providential entity who foreknows are thoughts, feelings, and life partners, then that also implies that those who came to Christian mingle only to fail miserably or not meet the right person were destined to do so. Conversely, it may imply that if you go out to a secular site and have better luck, this too was in God’s plan. It also may imply that those who come to Christian mingle actually do not trust in God because they are trying to speed the process along themselves, hence not holding onto the truth of God’s divine providence and care for their lives. In fact, this interpretation is closer to the Bible if one recalls the story of Abraham and Sarah, who didn’t trust God so that Ishmael became the bane of Israel’s existence. Christian mingle actually undermines its business model without even knowing it due to a misleading marketing advertisement.

It also creates the problematic claim that everyone who visits the site is destined to find their life partner. This claim isn’t unique to Christianmingle.com, but it does create forced emphasis when it seems that God should be there intervening on your behalf. The problem with this approach is that it creates an all-or-nothing approach that American Protestant Evangelical circles have attached their theological robes to for more than half a century now, i.e., that the nuclear family is a biblical mandate that is completely consistent with the scriptural witness. Of course, there are multiple kinds of marriage throughout the scripture, and I’m sure Christianmingle.com would want to downplay coming to the site to look for one’s concubine if his wife is infertile. But let’s move on.
 
The brilliance is that most lay religious people are theologically inept and so questions like this will not even arise for them. That means that either Christian mingle.com is knowingly deceptive and are willfully reading one side of the scriptures with much more emphasis than accounting for other emphases or they are blissfully ignorant (the blind leading the blind). The next time you hear a commercial that tells you they have God’s plan for your life, be a little suspicious. And if that is not enough, pick up your Bible and consider all the providential commandments God gives to the murder of enemies, the destruction of nation or Paul’s wish that all remained celibate just as he was, and then put those up against all the other statements in the Bible you actually favor to see where you land on the theological carousel!

The Principle of Mesirah: Omerta in the Jewish World and Jesus' Behavior in the Gospels

Concern about turning on fellow countrymen was a fact of Jewish life. After all, as a continually conquered and subjugated people, making nice with the oppressor could easily become a way of life. Conversely, to ignore such realities could cost you your life. Jews throughout time have proven to be good at both, at least under compulsion rather than as a force of habit. Their rebellions and subjugations are well known in the historical annals of planet Earth. From the Assyrians to the Greeks to the Romans to the Christians to the Muslims and beyond, Jews have continually been in a position that is a negotiation between these two poles.

The problem of conspiring with the enemy was often so deep that a word was given against committing such criminal behavior in the Talmud. Mesirah, as it was known, was the act of turning on a fellow Jew, by handing him over to Gentiles. These crimes could be against fellow Jews or against Gentiles, but either way , by those who applied this view, the sinner was looked upon as one who denied identifying features that strengthened the community bond.

A recent article by Joshua Hammerman illustrates the way in which Mesirah in contemporary times has been avoided and by doing so protected pedophiles within the Jewish community who have been given safe harbor at the cost of handing them over to the local authorities.  The Times of Israel reported on a case of such coercion in January 2013. Hammerman lays out the rabbinic origins of the practice, and in one place shows how Rashi applied the principle to Moses after he murdered the Egyptian.

Perhaps the most notorious use of the principle comes from none other than the Jewish ethicist and philosopher Maimonides, who bluntly encouraged the murder of any Jew who would go against his people, regardless of whether a moral transgression had taken place.

Yet there is another reason to give pause as we look at the life of Jesus, the Misith and friend of the Romans. In the gospels, Jesus clearly advocates a non-violent approach to the Roman occupation of his land. And while this alone may have made good strategic sense, for it spared waves of zealous men from death in full-on rebellion, there are other passages where Jesus goes beyond a mere acceptance of the reality of Roman occupation. In Luke 7, Jesus not only interacts kindly and thoughtfully with a Roman soldier but sings his praise as one who has greater faith than his own people! 

The Sermon on the Mount offers the best glimpse of a possible response to Mesirah. Jesus warns that a fellow Jew might drag off another to the Gentile courts for immoral behavior (Matthew 5:26). But rather than rebuke the practice as something that would have clearly been a kind of Mesirah, Jesus’ comments are directed at the victim of Mesirah instead of the perpetrator!  If we see these comments in light of the larger reality of revolution and oppression then the matter-of-fact way in which Jesus is said to deliver this warning begs the question of his revolutionary intent. And it seems that he is almost accepting of the practice as a way of life. In another instance (Matthew 18:15-17), Jesus seems to establish the terms for avoiding Mesirah though there is no condemnation of the practice itself. Unfortunately, this is a difficult verse to establish since it anachronistically speaks of a church that didn’t yet exist and establishes an ecclesiastical order that was most likely written back into the gospels after Jesus. For someone like Paul, however, Mesirah was clearly a transgression and act of treason.

When one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints? Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more, then, matters pertaining to this life! So if you have such cases, why do you lay them before those who have no standing in the church? I say this to your shame. Can it be that there is no one among you wise enough to settle a dispute between the brothers? (1 Corinthians 6:1-2)

In an even stronger condemnation, Paul states Christians are to suffer evil and moral transgressions when it deals with those in the community – a principle obviously derived from a rejection of Mesirah within his own Jewish context, but applied here to the church, Paul’s spiritual Israel.

But brother goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers? To have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded? (1 Corinthians 6:6-7)

One wonders how Paul might have treated the issue if a member in the church had sexually abused another’s child or murdered one of their own, but let’s move on.

Clearly the reality of Mesirah accomplished what it set out to do:  it challenged communal life by creating internal dissension. Postcolonial theory scholars like Moshe Rosman and Homi Bhadba have recognized this with regard to a methodological-historical approach to Jewish life at all intersections despite the charge of anachronism. Yet Rosman and Bhadba wrestled this insight from its colonial context and showed that while it evolves there this kind of master-servant dynamic is broader bound. To put the community at internal odds with itself is to manage a dangerous game yet at the same time increase the power structure and influence of the oppressor. Jesus’ acceptance of the practice could be seen as an unfortunate nod to its reality. But I want to argue that it could also be that in accepting its reality, there remained a way of working through it, and in doing so,  the cohesion that remained in the community was no longer reliant on numbers but on ideology and identity.  If Jesus believed in his Messianic role then sheer numbers were not as important as God’s self-identifying truth that he saw working through his life.  After all, it would be God who redeemed, and wayward Jews would not escape this reality regardless of where their loyalties. Perhaps this is what Paul also saw in his writing of Romans when he talks of Israel’s ultimate salvation.

Much of what Jesus says however gets lost when we read the Beatitudes as universal principles of conduct rather than responses to the political and social environment in which Jesus remained. The Roman principle of impressment, for example, crops up here as well as the ancient custom of how to receive and accept an insult. But these make no difference if we only read our own situation into Jesus’ world without first understanding the world in which he lived.

I think that Jesus’ bringing up of Jews hauling other Jews off to court was a contentious issue during Jesus’ time, and probably more pertinent to the context of his day than his promulgation of a universal morality being founded upon the ground of ancient Palestine where we imagine Jesus only as an ancient teacher of wisdom detached from his own world. The fact that a possible link to Mesirah is brought up in several places along with Jesus’ rather unique and matter-of-fact response could explain why such instances evoke against Jesus the charge of blasphemy even as it is believed to have been applied to his direct threat to destroy the Temple. The latter charge, in my opinion, has to be contextualized since many Jews had already abandoned the Temple’s centrality (consider Rabbi Zakkai, for example).  This means that the Temple narrative, by and large, depends upon Mesirah, and the state of affairs in which every day Jews interacted. I do believe Jesus saw himself as a messianic figure, but I don’t believe that the Temple is necessarily key to this claim. Jesus may have been radically misunderstood in his take on Mesirah, and this stirred the charges of blasphemy. But, it is in his unique response to Mesirah that Jesus can most clearly be identified as messianic, through which the Temple narrative and other responses spring out, especially if one considers that the “temple of his body” was not a physical structure, nor was it dependent upon physical entities, but upon an ideal of Israel, of the temple, and of himself.

While it might be said that such an interpretation requires a radically re-interpretation of the meaning of physical resurrection, I would only remark that I do not believe that we are confined to only one layer of meaning here. We must remember too, the “temple of his body” quote is a gloss by the gospel’s editor and not part of the narrative flow.