Diapers in Divinity School

Since God has ordained marriage, wrote Martin Luther, it is good for a priest to take a wife. But the founder of Protestantism, who did not marry until he was 41, might be surprised at the latest trend among U.S. Protestant ministers--marriage while still in seminary. Married students in leading seminaries rose from 15% in 1935 to 36% in 1955 to 60% last year.

A long, dim view of this nuptial speedup is taken this week by the Christian Century: "By what great shift in sociology, psychology, temperature or radiation are we to account for that clamant coupling of pre-ministerial students which threatens now to turn our dormitories into nurseries, our campuses into playpens, our graduate colleges into preschools? Ordinarily we would plead for no ivory tower, but if the choice is ivory tower or brooder coop, the remoter symbol looks better all the time."

Strictly for Whispering. The most obvious objection, says the liberal Protestant weekly, is economic. Seminaries find themselves spending money on quarters for married students that might otherwise go to maintenance or faculty improvement. The expense of "such massive swaddling" drove "the distinguished and dignified president of one of our proudest and most prestigious seminaries" to plead with his married students last fall to cut down their rate of reproduction. Some seminarians sign up for married quarters while they are still single. In one important Southern seminary, an administrator queried one such foresighted young man, who admitted he was neither married, engaged nor even particularly interested in anyone. "But," he said, "if I got into the married dorm year after next I know I could find a girl in plenty of time."

Another problem is the high psychological accident rate. "Women work, men study, families are raised in shifts; too busy people get on each other's too taut nerves in too crowded quarters in too noisy halls. So there are crackups: some lurid ones, strictly for whispering; more strained, silent ones gritted through in the analysts' offices."

The Gentling of a Man. But the worst result may be the long-range effect of family responsibilities on young men. Their attitude to their studies is naturally a more "practical" one; they concentrate on subjects that will get them through seminary fastest and guarantee the best posts--"the 'how-to' courses which will make them the skilled technicians and craftsmen for whom the best market waits." The unmarried student, on the other hand, has more freedom to grow in breadth and depth by ranging through the offbeat areas and collateral readings. "Is there not some danger," asks the Century, "that men who spend seminary time learning to be homemakers are thereafter too apt to be at home in the church as it is and to let the church be at home in the world as it is?

"Heaven knows, the parish itself soon enough pats even the most independent preacher down into comfortable conformities. But that gentling will be one thing for the man who can remember a time when in his freedom he questioned and challenged and criticized--a different thing from the gentling of a man who from the beginning, driven by family practicalities, has been seeking the pattern that he might conform.

"The trouble with the church today is exactly its dreadful domestication. The last thing it needs is more domesticated ministers."

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