MrBeast gets married

The most popular YouTube creator in the world, MrBeast, is getting married. The content creator, whose real name is James “Jimmy” Donaldson, proposed to his girlfriend, South African influencer Thea Boysen, over Christmas.

Donaldson not only has nearly 350 million YouTube subscribers—the most in the world—but also has his own line of food products, Feastables. He recently signed a $100 million deal with Amazon Prime, where he hosts a reality show. Donaldson, who was named to the Time 100 list in 2023 and featured on the cover of Time magazine, is known for his loud acts of philanthropy, including giving $10,000 away to a homeless man, funding 1,000 cataract surgeries for the visually impaired, or giving every family in a village a full year’s salary.

Donaldson’s decision to get married is culturally significant. The YouTube star, who grew up as an evangelical but seems to have left his childhood faith, is nevertheless bucking the trend among young people in the United States. Though divorce rates have fallen, the number of people under 40 who are unmarried is at an all-time high. The median age of marriage in the United States is now 30 for men and 28 for women.

This trend has significant social ramifications. Marriage is not only a Christian practice; it is a creational good given by God to the world for the flourishing of humanity. As University of Virginia scholar Brad Wilcox has documented, the decline of marriage has a devastating effect on society, including a rise in violent crime, poverty, and other maladies. Yet many of our elite institutions have preached the supposed virtues of a commitment-free sexual revolution.

“Dominant elites have advanced ideas that devalue and demean marriage, cast aside the normative guardrails that forge strong families, passed laws that penalize marriage for the poor and working class, and superintended the rise of a new economy that benefits them but has put marriage and family life out of reach for millions of their fellow Americans,” Wilcox writes. He points to the irony “that the very group—our ruling class—that has sabotaged our most fundamental social institution has figured out ways to protect their own families even as marriage flounders in the nation at large.”

This is why Donaldson’s decision to tie the knot is significant, even if he didn’t intend to send a message to his millions of young fans. Commentator Michael Knowles was right when he said, “It’s good when anyone gets married. But it’s especially good when a 26-year-old billionaire with 340 million followers decides to get married four years below the median age of marriage for men in a country with a crisis of marriage and a below-replacement birthrate.”

Christians shouldn’t hesitate to preach the goodness of marriage in a culture that has so aggressively devalued it. Our churches should be places where the goodness of the male and female one-flesh union is regularly championed and where couples can find resources to help their relationships flourish. This will often be controversial, even among some evangelical voices who warn about a supposed “cult of the family.” But in an age when families are crumbling around us and when the social effects of the sexual revolution are wreaking havoc on our communities, we should not be shy about presenting God’s good gift to a needy world.

Reversing an anti-marriage culture will mostly happen through institutions like the church. Still, Christians should also not hesitate to advocate for family-friendly government policies at the local and national levels. Conservatives will have spirited debates about these ideas but should welcome any effort to make tax policies less antagonistic to struggling families while incentivizing the building of healthy marriages and families. Economist Milton Friedman was right when he declared, “The family, rather than the individual, has always been and remains today the basic building block of our society.”

Conservatives can and should applaud MrBeast’s decision to get married. Perhaps his new commitment will inspire others in his generation to follow suit.