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.”
Click Here To Read More (Originally Published at World Magazine)
