Yes. Dr. Sean McDowell argues that the reason sits underneath the Bible’s teaching, not in place of it. Marriage is a real thing with a nature of its own: a permanent, exclusive union of a man and a woman, oriented toward children. If that is what marriage is, then defining it this way describes something rather than discriminates against anyone. The debate is usually fought over who may marry. The question of what marriage is gets skipped, and it decides almost everything else.
That claim deserves testing on its own terms. It also comes with a second demand, pressed as hard as the first: the church that makes this argument has to turn the same scrutiny on itself.
Why argue from nature at all if the Bible already speaks?
Among Christians, McDowell goes to the texts first: Genesis, Romans 1 and Matthew 19:3-6. Matthew 19:4-6 is a central reason the church defines marriage as it does. Asked about divorce, Jesus answers by going back to creation. The Creator made them male and female, and a man leaves his parents and cleaves to his wife. Then Jesus draws the conclusion: “Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh: what therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19:6). Twain is the older English word for two.
But a person who does not accept the Bible’s authority will not be moved by a verse, and the conversation stalls before it starts. So with non-believers McDowell reverses the direction: “I don’t reason from the Bible, I reason to the Bible.”
The logic is worth spelling out. If Scripture describes marriage truly, the reality it describes should be visible to anyone who looks carefully at the world. A true description should fit the thing. This opens the Christian view to inspection in a way a bare appeal to authority does not, and it is a bet that the inspection will confirm the text rather than embarrass it.
Genesis itself supports the approach. As McDowell puts it, “Genesis one is not the creation of the Jewish or the Christian people.” Abraham does not appear until Genesis 12. The account of man and woman comes before Israel, before covenant law, before any religious community. Read on its own literary terms, it presents marriage as part of how humanity was made, not as a rule for one group. That is why McDowell can say, “Even if I were not a Christian, I would still be in favor of natural marriage.”
What premise does the whole debate rest on?
Most arguments about marriage go wrong at the first step. People argue about fairness, equality and hatred before agreeing on what they are arguing about. McDowell names the step they skip: “the key question is, what is marriage? And we can’t call people hateful until we first answer what marriage is.”
Two pictures compete. In the first, marriage is a flexible human arrangement whose purpose is personal fulfillment, shaped however we like. In the second, marriage exists before us and has a shape we did not give it. The second picture carries a consequence McDowell states plainly: “if there’s actually something called marriage outside of you and outside of me, and we don’t have the right to change it, then we need to conform our lives to that standard, whether we feel like it or not.”
What makes the argument honest rather than rhetorical is a concession. If marriage is only about personal happiness and has nothing to do with children, McDowell grants, “then of course same-sex marriage makes perfect sense.” He does not pretend the other side reasons badly from shared premises. He locates the disagreement in the premise itself. Lisa Fields makes the same point from the side of authority: our desires do not set the parameters of marriage. A culture trained to treat feelings as the measure of everything will stop asking what marriage is for.
This changes what the charge of hatred can mean. If marriage is a committed bond between any people who love each other, excluding some of them looks like discrimination, and McDowell admits as much. If marriage is the union of a man and a woman, saying so is a description, not an attack. But a correct definition settles less than it seems to. It tells us whether a belief is hateful. It does not tell us whether a particular person holding it has acted with hatred. A true definition can still be used to humiliate someone, and the church has done exactly that. The definition removes one accusation. It leaves the other one standing until conduct answers it.
What does McDowell say marriage actually is?
Asked for a definition, McDowell gives one: “marriage is a permanent exclusive union between a man and a woman that has the intent of having children.” Each part does work. Permanence and exclusivity distinguish marriage from a passing relationship. The man and the woman are required by the last clause, because the union is oriented toward children.
The argument for that orientation draws on the body. Nearly every bodily system functions completely within one person: breathing, digestion, circulation, movement. Reproduction is the exception. A man has half of it and a woman has the other half. McDowell describes the two as “like a lock and a key designed to work together to become a one flesh union with the orientation of producing kids, even if a child does not actually result from it.” He ties this to Genesis 2:24, where a man “shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”
This is the heart of the case, and it is not mainly about statistics. It is a claim about what kind of act sexual union between a man and a woman is. In McDowell’s words, “sex by itself is a child bearing act,” whether or not a child results. He illustrates how far the culture has moved from that idea with a campus debate in which a student said babies come from failed contraception. The line is funny because it exposes an assumption: that sex and children are only accidentally connected.
Outcomes or natures?
McDowell also offers a social argument, borrowed from marriage advocate Maggie Gallagher. Society needs a next generation. Sexual union between a man and a woman is how that generation comes to be. Children need a mother and a father. This is why society takes an interest in marriage that it does not take in tennis partners or neighbors.
He supports the third step with research he cites, including a book by a non-Christian author on the importance of fathers and a long-term study of faith transmission that, by his account, found a warm relationship with a father to be the leading factor. These are McDowell’s reports of what those authors found, and a reader would need to examine the studies to weigh them. Lisa Fields adds that the cost of fatherlessness is visible in neighborhoods without any research at all, and McDowell answers that it is “a human issue,” not a racial one.
The two arguments differ in kind. The social argument is probabilistic. Children generally do better with a mother and a father, which can be true while many single parents, grandparents and adoptive families raise children well. A claim about average outcomes can give a society reason to favor an institution. It cannot by itself tell us what the institution is.
The bodily argument is different. It does not say man-woman marriages always produce better results. It says only the union of a man and a woman is the kind of union from which children come. The weight of the case rests there. The social evidence explains why the definition matters for the common good. The definition itself comes from the structure of the union.
What about couples who cannot have children?
This is the most familiar objection to any definition built on procreation. If marriage is oriented toward children, are infertile marriages purposeless, or not marriages at all?
McDowell’s answer turns on the difference between an orientation and an outcome. A football game is ordered toward scoring, yet a scoreless tie is still football. Its aim was not reached, but it was still the kind of thing that has that aim. An infertile couple, he argues, still joins in the kind of act that is childbearing by nature. A union of two men or two women is infertile “by definition,” not by circumstance. He adds that infertility is often traced to the man, so this is not a burden one sex carries alone.
The reply is coherent, but its strongest challenge is not the one it answers. A critic can grant everything about bodily purposes. Reproductive organs are for reproduction, and an infertile union is still that kind of act. The critic can then ask why that function, rather than lifelong commitment and mutual care, should define marriage. On that view, procreation is one good marriage may serve, not the feature that makes it marriage. Some Christians reason this way too. The gap is between the body’s design and the institution’s definition, and the lock-and-key image does not cross it on its own.
Closing the gap requires showing why the procreative union is the defining feature and companionship is not. McDowell’s strongest resource is his own social point. Why does any society bind marriage with norms of permanence and exclusivity that it never applies to close friendships? The procreative account has an answer: these are the conditions under which children are best raised by the two people who made them. The companionship account has to explain why friendship, which can be just as loving, carries no such norms. Whether that answer persuades is the real question, and more data on child outcomes will not settle it.
Isn’t this the same as opposing interracial marriage?
The comparison comes up often, including from some pastors who argue that because Black Americans were once oppressed by the law, they should side with anyone the law excludes. Lisa Fields rejects the parallel, holding that skin color and sexuality are not the same issue. McDowell agrees for a reason that follows from his definition.
A man and a woman of different races still form the same kind of union. “There’s never been any sophisticated debate about that,” he says. Removing sex difference is another matter: “But it is new to introduce the idea of genderless marriage, where all of a sudden gender doesn’t matter.”
The obvious rejoinder is that appeals to what marriage really is have been used before to exclude people, so why trust this one? The fair answer is that such an appeal earns trust only if it names a feature that actually belongs to the union. Race names nothing about the act or its orientation toward children. A rule against interracial marriage added a condition that the structure of the union never required. Sex difference is the structure the bodily argument describes. That distinction holds only if the bodily argument holds, so the comparison cannot be dismissed apart from it. The history is also a standing warning. Arguments from nature can be bent to serve prejudice, and they have to show their work.
McDowell does not dismiss the pastor’s motive. Siding with people who feel marginalized is a good instinct, and as a white man he expects he has not experienced what that pastor has. But a good instinct still has to answer the prior question. Whether exclusion is unjust depends on whether the thing excluded from is defined rightly.
What follows for the church that makes this argument?
Here the scrutiny turns around. The first thing McDowell and his co-author say in their book, he explains, is that “rather than pointing fingers, we need to take a deep look inside at how we’ve treated people with same sex attraction.” The failures are concrete: jokes, demeaning talk about people on the other side, and a refusal to treat everyone as an image bearer of God.
Selectivity weakens the church’s claim to act on principle. Christians, McDowell observes, are “not holding rallies in Washington DC against gossip or pornography.” That matters logically, not just morally. If the church’s stance on marriage comes from submission to a reality it did not invent, the same submission should govern everything else. A church loud about one sin and quiet about others invites the suspicion that its convictions track discomfort rather than truth.
The definition makes the point sharper. It calls marriage permanent and exclusive. A church that defends the man-woman part while treating permanence and faithfulness casually among its own members is not holding the definition it claims. The standard that binds the culture binds the church first.
Scripture draws this line too. McDowell cites 1 Corinthians 5:12: “For what have I to do to judge them also that are without? do not ye judge them that are within?” In context, Paul is correcting a church that tolerated sin inside its own body. The passage describes a difference in how the church relates to its members and to its neighbors. Toward those outside, the posture is grace and generosity, with a ready answer when someone asks for the reason behind one’s hope, as 1 Peter 3:15 says. The pattern is Jesus himself: “Jesus was a friend of sinners. He didn’t compromise on calling things out as sin.” The people the religious elite despised wanted to be near him. McDowell doubts most people would say that of Christians now.
An argument about natures can also sound cold to someone for whom this is not abstract. Lisa Fields raised a friend who experiences same-sex attraction and wants a family. McDowell’s first response is not an argument but an affirmation: “Those are good desires that God has placed inside of you.” The longing for relationship reflects being made in God’s image. Then he challenges the assumption that a life without marriage is lesser. Jesus, Jeremiah, Paul and John the Baptist were, in his words, “fully actualized human beings who are celibate,” and deep non-sexual friendship and committed community meet real needs for intimacy. This is not a side comfort. If marriage has a nature we did not choose, a life lived outside it cannot be treated as second class, or the definition becomes a weapon rather than a description.
Where the argument leaves us
McDowell’s case establishes something narrower and more useful than a slogan. The disagreement over marriage is not mainly about love, fairness or tolerance. It is about whether marriage has a nature, and whether the procreative union of a man and a woman is its center rather than one of its goods. Someone who accepts that has strong reason to accept the conclusion. Someone who doubts it will be moved only by an argument at that level, and the honest move is to make that argument there.
If the argument is right, it also establishes a standard the church cannot exempt itself from. A reality that exists outside of us judges everyone who claims to honor it. A church that wants the culture to accept what marriage is has to show, in how it treats people and how it keeps its own vows, that it believes this too.