Saving our civilization: child marriage as a traditional Christian value

In the previous post we have discussed the historical transition from a society that took arranged marriages for granted to our contemporary one, characterised by the supremacy of personal individual choice. We have also seen that the feudal times had different notions regarding the acceptable age for marriage. Again, within the primitive social circumstances - where the economy does not require universal education and the concept of career was only relevant to a tiny portion of the population - marrying at the ages of 12-14 was totally understandable. Given all the economic progress since those days, as well as all the social progress that it implies, 18 years has become a newly dominant consensus for a legal matrimony.

Nevertheless, even within the so-called developed world this standard is not yet maintained absolutely. And if “making America great again” implies going back in time, then there are still parts of the US that in this sense have “remained great”. “Child marriage was legal in all 50 states until 2018”, and as of 2025 only 16 states have now fully banned such possibility. Once again, this shows, of course, that social progress is happening here as well - inevitably, irreversibly, and no matter how slowly.

“Delaware and New Jersey were the first to completely end child marriage in 2018, followed shortly by American Samoa. The U.S. Virgin Islands, Pennsylvania and Minnesota followed suit in 2020. Rhode Island and New York passed bans in 2021. Massachusetts banned the practice in 2022. Vermont, Connecticut and Michigan followed in 2023. Washington, Virginia and New Hampshire passed their own bans in 2024. And Washington D.C., Maine, Oregon and Missouri became the most recent to end child marriage in 2025.”

It takes time, unfortunately, for the outdated social norms to fully die out. Generational change is a slow process, and many such seemingly ridiculous social norms survive by adapting to the new social consciousness. But not all. Aside from arranged marriages, the near impossibility to divorce, or the acceptance of consanguinity, there also once existed a particular feudal marriage-related payment called the “merchet”. To be sure, it only pertained to the social class of unfree peasants, as well as solely to the females that belonged within. Here is some historical context:

“Family politics and relative wealth acquisition played their parts from the mightiest to the least in the land. However the peasantry or those descended from villeins had to find the money to pay marriage fines and there were plenty of them. Leyser describes Merchet – a fine paid for a licence to marry; legerwite which literally translates as a laying down fine was the fine levied on a woman who had had pre-marital sex (there was no corresponding male fine) and there was also chidewite which was the fee for having an illegitimate child. You might also find yourself having to marry someone your lord had decreed was a suitable match for you – though of course this is something that every strata of society had to deal with.”

Essentially, this merchet constituted a sum of money that the bride from the peasant class would have to pay to her lord for his permission to marry. Moreover, “if she married someone under the lord’s jurisdiction, the merchet would be smaller. If she married farther afield, though, the payment was correspondingly larger.” Different economic conditions led to different social reality and different understanding of the social world:

“The lord’s ‘permission’ for the marriage of a female bond tenant to a man from another manor was symbolised by the payment of a merchet, in compensation for the fact that her children would live elsewhere and not be able to give him service.”

And while usually not subject to a payment, male serfs would also have to ask for their lord’s permission to marry. For comparison, would we find it acceptable today to require a permission from your local city mayor in order to marry your chosen person? Or, for instance, if a woman had to pay her employer a special payment in order to obtain his or her permission to become somebody’s wife? Or, perhaps, such a payment should accrue to the landlord whom she pays the rent for her apartment? Given that this merchet payment could also be considered as a “traditional value” of the Christian civilization, would not our contemporary conservative Christians be willing to include it into their agenda? On the other hand, this might not turn out to be very helpful within their quest to make the (white) families have more babies. But here again, the feudal economy would create its own particular notions regarding family planning, whereas our contemporary material reality has created much lower birth rates. We simply look at kids - and at an individual person in general - in a different way than our medieval ancestors did. And nobody can do anything about it.

Just as the large families are a thing of the past within the developed parts of the world, so are the child marriages coming to an end there as well. And this despite the fact that some conservative lunatics might still manage to find justification for this social phenomenon. Here are some examples:

“In Wyoming, Republican lawmakers circulated a letter to constituents earlier this year that argued that preventing children from marriage could discourage teen parents from being able to raise their children under one roof. [...] In West Virginia, a Republican spoke out this year against a proposed child marriage ban because he was a teenager when he was married and worried that young people who wanted to get married would simply travel out of state to do so.”

“It may also surprise you that resistance comes not just from conservatives, who have argued that an outright ban would risk either leaving teen mothers unmarried or the encouragement of abortion, but also from strongholds on the political left. In California, which has no legal age minimum for marriage, Planned Parenthood has argued that banning marriage under the age of 18 would 'impede on the reproductive rights of minors and their ability to decide what is best for them, their health, and their lives.'"

No matter how atrocious this might appear from our contemporary perspective, even here we find arguments that had to be adapted to our modern times. Namely, everything is portrayed as benefiting the young individuals in question. Their personal choices are put at the centre. As is clear, the feudal ideology is long dead. Because the feudal economy has long been dead. And it is just a matter of time before the last vestiges of child marriage die out as well.

Sources:
https://www.euronews.com/2023/03/01/at-what-age-can-you-legally-get-married-in-europe
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/manuscriptsandspecialcollections/learning/medievalwomen/theme5/marriagearrangements.aspx
https://www.newcastlecastle.co.uk/castle-blog/wedding
https://thehistoryjar.com/2017/07/30/rules-for-medieval-marriage/
https://emilykq.weebly.com/blog/merchet
https://19thnews.org/2023/07/explaining-child-marriage-laws-united-states/
https://thefulcrum.us/governance-legislation/child-marriage-bans

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