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One must wonder, in that still vaguely Christian era when divorce was simply not countenanced, how many miserable couples lived and died in marriages that had long since ceased to fulfill the overblown promises of the romantic ideal. Certainly when, in the 20th century, the romantic expectations for marriage continued at white heat and the proscription on divorce began to be loosened, countless couples fled such misery.

This tortuous emotional longing and loss represented the unpaid bills of a society that had overthrown the communally held sacred beliefs and traditions of Christendom, replacing them with the romantic individualism of the Enlightenment. No longer did each person find meaning by walking with a community of believers down well-worn paths of Christian belief and practice. Now each young man and woman had to work out their own romantic salvation—find Ultimate Meaning in the beating of two hearts as one.

But of course, not everyone in the Victorian period actually left the church. And not all those who stayed had only a nominal faith. For the era of the romantic was also the age of the evangelical.

So what of those evangelicals? In America, especially within the warm-hearted ranks of John Wesley's Methodists, they continued to worship and live in community. But a subtle shift took place, as romanticism morphed into an intense Christian version. This was a high-powered "heart religion" whose script for the fulfilled Christian life followed, line-by-line, the plot of the age's blockbuster sentimental novels.

The shift happened in the intense revivalism of the Methodist "holiness movement." If you were a holiness believer, you understood conversion as, yes, an experience of being forgiven and made right before God. But it was also an experience that left your sinful nature—your bad emotions—intact. Like the wandering, seeking young person of a sentimental novel, you had to push on to full redemption—through an experience of pure, whole-souled romantic love. This experience was called "entire sanctification." Only through this emotional cleansing could you reach your true goal: a heart filled with perfect love for God—with no affection stinted or spared for lavishing on anyone else.

Sound intense? It was. Believers wrestling for sanctification often reported that God challenged them in the manner of Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac: Would they, God seemed to thunder, give up that (idolatrous) affection for their wife, their husband, or their child, giving their whole heart to Jesus alone? Only when they made this "entire consecration" could the holiness folk receive the desired heart-cleansing and the new level of romantic union with God.

This hyper-vertical version of the Christian life—bequeathed from the holiness movement to the Pentecostal movement—assumes that God has made us so that all our emotional needs and all of the meaning of our lives comes through a direct, mystical relationship with Him. Almost accidentally, it turns out that no human relationship can hold a candle to this romantic God-tryst.

A pause for theological reflection:

God created human beings to have relationship not only with Him but with each other. A man who finds a wife, Scripture insists, finds a good thing—for many reasons. Children around the table are a blessing. Same-sex friendship, such as that between David and Jonathan, can be as important and rewarding as romantic love.

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September (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48