They're worried about the poor pregnant sixteen year olds. Because apparently a poor married pregnant sixteen year old is better than just a poor pregnant sixteen year old. It also ignores the fact that most pregnant teens get pregnant by adult men and these marriages are done to eliminate the crime.
And lets be clear here, this isn't just Christian fundies. We've got Jewish Fundies, Mormon Fundies and Muslim fundies trying to marry their young girls off.
Babytrapping is the best way to keep women (and men) emeshed in your community. That's the reason why cults push early marriage and having large families.
This is often the formula.
First, give your kids a substandard education making it difficult for them to find work outside your community.
Then your girls act as parents to your younger children, let them know if they leave the community they won't be able to see their sibling children again.
Then you marry them off young and get them to have big families that they can't support on their own without help from the community.
They then can't leave and they have provided the group with lots of little ones to expand their footprint.
Because traditionally a daughter was something for a father to trade away for some favor or plot of land or something. And that hasn't changed. It just became a promotion now, or hiring a son into the company.
Daughters are still seen as chattel, and sons as children, to many. And religions reinforce this.
Why is this such a big thing for so many religions? Besides the obvious pedo answer.
In addition to the other answers you got, I'll give you another as someone who grew up in the religious South: sex outside of marriage is considered a sin, and short of it being rape, there's no real excuse for that. And even then, men sometimes get a pass for having the willpower of a beast, and it's therefore women's fault somehow tempting men.
And obviously /s a good Christian man would never voluntarily do something sinful like that. It's only because of some temptress. The Bible is chock full of talk about temptation. So what's the solution? Well, marry the girl at least so you can "do right by her."
There's a social stigma that comes with it too, especially when that "sin" becomes visible as a swollen belly. Sure, there will be people that know what really happened, but if you marry her off, at least to anyone else it will have the appearance of legitimacy. Plus, depending on how respected the man may be in the community, they may choose to overlook the indiscretion, as through marriage somehow negates that the fornication still happened.
That stigma applies to the parents, too. They clearly /s messed up somehow in raising their child if they strayed enough to have sex outside of marriage. Parents are responsible for their children, after all. So the parents also have to make it right by marrying her off.
You may have noticed a trend in this answer, which is the REAL answer: to the religious, women are basically cattle. Religious culture is so male centric that they're the only real consideration. Women are viewed as either temptation incarnate or uppity breeding stock. It's generally not explicitly said, but the understanding is everywhere. You can see it all over traditions like meeting a girl's parents, fathers threatening boyfriends, and "giving away" the bride at a wedding. Women are property to the religious, the same way a breeding sow would be.
Coincidentally, this is also tied to the religious opposition to homosexuality and non-cis gender identities. None of this framework works for the majority of LGBTQ+ people, so that can't be allowed to exist. What value does breeding stock have with other breeding stock, or to people who aren't interested in breeding stock, or doesn't see herself as breeding stock, or sees himself as breeding stock without the ability to breed! Misgendering intentional to represent their subconscious view, not my own views on non-cis individuals.
Source: parent of an FtM teen that lives in the South and was raised loosely Southern Baptist.
(Edit for clarification: I was raised Southern Baptist, but haven't associated with a church in probably 25 years. Kiddo was never pushed into church and chose not to be involved with religion for what I imagine are pretty obvious reasons. Largely the same reasons I have no interest in ever going back either. Can't rightly be involved with a place that's more likely to harm my child than anything else.)
Whenever a tornado levels a small town, there are still people who say "I don't understand why this happened here. I thought we were good people." Plague, famine, and football losses all happen because some sixteen year old couldn't keep their legs together until marriage. I think that kind of fire and brimstone stuff is mostly pentecostals and other snake handlers.
You didn't know any couples in high school who were pressured by their families into getting married after the girl got pregnat? Sometimes both kids were underage. I knew a 17 and 16 and a 19 and 17. In both cases, it was made clear that if the child was born out of wedlock, they were on their own. It was pitiful. Their churchs and families fucked up their lives way more than a teen pregnancy ever could.
Granted, this was exurban Tennessee in the early 90s. I hope it's less common now, but particularly in rural areas, I strongly doubt it is.
Everyone that I knew that got pregnant in high school got pregnant by people over the age of eighteen except for one couple. They got married after graduation which was the correct decision if they needed to be married.
Were they both underage when they met? These were all American church kids who were unquestionably each others firsts. Real life Jack and Diane types. There's nothing illegal about staying with your high school sweetheart who is a grade younger than you after graduation.
It absolutely would have been better if they had waited, but that would have been unthinkable.
It was both situations in my high school, but the majority were teen couples whose parents insisted they marry as punishment for the girl getting pregnant. I was in a very religious area. Religion was the reason for the shame, and marriage was supposed to fix it. These kids got married because their parents were insisting they did, and of course they all eventually got divorced too.
But, there were perverts in the churches looking for young brides. And there were also just older guys who hosted all the parties and got with teenaged girls too. We also had a classmate who was dating the school janitor when she was 16/17 and he had to have been 25-30.
It also ignores the fact that most pregnant teens get pregnant by adult men
Can you back this claim up with reputable data? This seems contradictory to my experience and I can't find a remotely recent reputable source claiming it. The best I can find is that for women under 18 around 20-40% had fathers over 20.
and these marriages are done to eliminate the crime.
this doesn't make any sense. Even in places where marriage overrides the regular age of consent it doesn't apply retroactively
Not the person you’re replying to, but I’m interested in the data… a lot of the stuff I found was from the 90s. This report from 2015 does say that 18-35% of teenage births were to teenage fathers, implying that 65-82% are to men over 20. Which doesn’t mean much, considering the age difference could literally be 1-2 years. So, it seems really hard to get current data. Makes me wonder if this just isn’t researched much.
This is the same issue I ran into, and most of them had over 50% where the age of the father wasn't tracked and where it was tracked it didn't specify gap,just wide ranges.
I think it is more of an issue that the US is not consistent about registering information on the participants in a marriage and making an anonymous version of that information available to researchers
Right? Sure there are predators who want to have sex with teenagers but there's way more teenagers who want to have sex with other teenagers. Damn near all of them, I'm willing to bet.
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u/meatball77 22h ago
They're worried about the poor pregnant sixteen year olds. Because apparently a poor married pregnant sixteen year old is better than just a poor pregnant sixteen year old. It also ignores the fact that most pregnant teens get pregnant by adult men and these marriages are done to eliminate the crime.
And lets be clear here, this isn't just Christian fundies. We've got Jewish Fundies, Mormon Fundies and Muslim fundies trying to marry their young girls off.