Pilgrims passing through

Carolyn McCulley went to college amid post-1970s feminism and became a Bible-believing Christian in 1993. She is the author of The Measure of Success, Radical Womanhood, and Did I Kiss Marriage Goodbye?

When you were a women’s studies major at the University of Maryland, what were some of your beliefs? Women were oppressed due to patriarchy. Men were the problem. I was pro-abortion, pro-choice. By the grace of God I didn’t have to make that decision for myself, but I never knew anybody who was pro-life.

What happened when you were 30? My younger sister had become a Christian in college through Campus Crusade. She was faithful to share the gospel with me, and I was, like, “whatever.” I just didn’t care, but God set me up on a trip to South Africa to see her—she was studying there at a Bible college. On Easter I went to a church where I heard the gospel and knew that God had a claim on my life. I began to back into the kingdom of God—it was “beep, beep, beep.” It took about six months of being around people who were purposely discipling me and helping me walk through this change that I began to understand I needed to repent.

You write that, “sitting among people who had once despised each other for the color of their skin I learned that hope for change was found in the life and death of Jesus Christ.” Was it a particular sermon, or the lives of the people, that influenced you? All of it. The pastor was very clear and articulate in explaining the gospel from start to end in a way I’d never heard it before, making all the pieces come together. I could see the love of Jesus that these people had for one another. In a country that had legitimized racial separation, the unifying effect of Christ’s love spoke to me. I had never seen Christ’s love worked out.

Once you started attending church regularly, did you feel a different type of pressure, with members coming to you and thinking, or asking, why you weren’t married? I didn’t value marriage before I became a Christian. I’d come through a system that said gender is just a social construct. To find out that there is a scriptural purpose in our gender was a revelation to me.

How do churches often treat unmarried women in their 30s? As a single person you could be seen as the pariah, the person who might intervene in a family. A lot of times I just wanted to say to people, “I’m sure you love your husband, there is no problem here, honey. I’m not attracted to your husband. Go ahead and love him.” You can’t say that because that’s rude, but you’re seen as, “If you’re single we need to talk to you from 10 paces away.”

A lot of churches have singles ministries, but is that creating a form of apartheid? You will never get an answer where people will agree on this. If you don’t pay attention to singles, then “Nobody is paying attention to us.” If you get single ministries, it’s “Don’t single me out.” But singleness is not a monolithic experience: Being single in your 20s is very different from your singleness in your 30s, which is different from your 40s, from your 50s and beyond. In a large church I can see the pastoral efficiency of ministering to people by season of life.

No one-size-fits-all? All of us need to be gracious about where we are. You may feel slighted, but loneliness is an epidemic in this broken world. You may think that marriage would solve it, or having kids would solve it, or having this kind of job solves it; but everyone who has those things is also experiencing loneliness because we are broken.

Some of that distinction between singleness and marriage is breaking down, as even in churches we face an epidemic of cohabiting. What do you ask young women involved in that? Do you know you are a pilgrim, a pilgrim on a battlefield, a pilgrim on the way home? Are you trading joy for some lesser shiny bauble that is crumbling with death and decay as you look at it? Remember, when we die our prize is Him looking at us with intense love and saying, “Well done good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your Master.”

How do young persons respond to that? I feel for my nieces and nephews and my friends who are young adults now. It would have been much, much harder for me now had I become a Christian in this culture than 25 years ago.

As you age, is singleness harder or easier for you? It’s different. You go through the first wave of friends getting married and babies, and now you’re in the second wave of those babies getting married. It’s a fear shift. When you’re younger it’s, “I’m not going to have the life I want.” When older you get tempted with, “There’s nothing left to look forward to.” But no matter where you are in life it’s the same battle because the enemy hasn’t changed since the beginning of time. “Has God really said?” Does He really care? Does He have a good plan for you? It feels different in different seasons, but it’s essentially the same thing: trusting Him. The answer is always the same: We aren’t meant for this life. We’re passing through the land of the dying into the land of the living.

How does your new book, The Measure of Success, fit with your writing about singleness? We can have a default idea at times: If you don’t get married and have children, then “Ta da! You can have the really great career.” Then you find out that you have the really mediocre career, and you think, “What happened?” For young adults now the great questions of the ages—“Who am I? Why am I here?”—have been pressed into your work. You are supposed to find your satisfaction: “I am called to do this. This is my fulfillment.” That puts even more pressure on productivity, especially for women.

Women who do get married and have children face career pressures as well. I was alive at a time in the culture when feminism was talking about sequences—that if we want to be radical we should say that women’s lifestyles and window of fertility are so different from men’s that women could get educated, start a career, drop off to have children, rear families, and come back on when they were finished having children. But others thought the difference between men and women is a social construct—and they won. Had the sequencers won, our general culture would be better off, because we have seen that our biologies are varied, and not a social construct.