The immorality of engagement rings

[mrbilliam]

A popular belief in worldly circles is that a man should buy his fiancée an engagement ring. Let us look deeper into this practice.

The diamond trade has sordid origins involving apartheid, slavery, war, and blatant racism. But diamonds for engagement rings are fairly new custom which started in the 1930s. Why? DeBeers, a cartel run out of apartheid South Africa, needed a market for diamonds. So they decided to market the idea of engagement rings and then hike up the price of diamonds and create the perception they are somehow very valuable.

They were largely successful, so billions of dollars of diamonds started to be sold in America and other places. Meanwhile, diamonds were mined by people in near slavery or actual slavery conditions - not to mention the profits thereof often used to fund wars, most famously the very violent conflict in Western Africa in Sierra Leone. Despite these sordid associations, Christians kept buying them.

DeBeers promoted the idea that “three months’ salary” should be spent on such a ring. But why? Does the Bible support this concept? It absolutely does not.

An engagement ring is one of the worst purchases a young couple can make. It immediately loses most of its value after the sale, being worth maybe ¼ or ⅓ of its retail price. (If diamonds were so valuable, they wouldn’t lose much value, much as a gold bar or gold coin doesn’t lose much value after you buy it.)

It does absolutely nothing to support a marriage or build a godly foundation - indeed, people who wear engagement rings get divorced at alarming rates. Plain Anabaptists, who don’t, have a much lower divorce rate.

But saying “no” to the blood diamond trade, exorbitant “costly array”, and ostentatiousness isn’t just for plain Anabaptists. All Christians should heed the clear words of scripture and say no to the diamond engagement ring.

Most diamonds today are lab grown and ethical.

[Josh]

Most?

[Ken]

Most?

I looked it up.

Something like 70% of all the diamonds sold are industrial diamonds. And in the industrial market, 98% of the diamonds are now lab grown.

In the 30% of the diamond market that is for jewelry and gemstones, about 17% was lab grown in 2023 and that number is rising rapidly.

So it is accurate to say that most diamonds sold today are lab grown. But of the subset of diamonds sold as gemstones, the majority are still natural diamonds with the lab grown portion catching up fast and on target to catch and pass natural diamonds before the end of the decade.

[Josh]

This post is not “the immorality of sharp knives”.

[Ken]

This post is not “the immorality of sharp knives”.

Yes, but we all stray all over the place in these threads, including you.

We don't know what mrbilliam meant when he wrote "Most diamonds today are lab grown and ethical." which is a technically accurate statement but not if we are talking about gem diamonds used in engagement rings. He will have to clarify.