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I want to offer another perspective.
I knew someone who got married at 16. The groom was 18, they both came from religious families, and they ended up divorcing at like 22, which was basically a few months after they moved to a liberal area on the west coast.
I don't think any sane person would call this grooming. At no point was I given the impression that the husband in this situation was abusive. However the situation was fundamentally fucked in a way that was unfair for both parties. My friend felt pressured to be a homemaker while still in high school, while her ex felt even more pressure to be a provider despite having no real emotional or financial capacity for doing so. They also both tried to make it work much longer than they should have, which inflicted a further set of scars.
We live in a world fundamentally more complex than what the average person had to experience 100 years ago. We don't let teenagers do things like buy alcohol or smoke cigarettes. It is almost expected that 18 - 21 year olds in the US will be on some major level dependent on their parents.
Even in cases where there isn't abuse, we shouldn't be letting minors get married. It is just an unfair position to put both parties in.
There was still grooming and still abuse. It was just done by the church.
I get what you're saying but instilling fucked up religious values in a kid is a completely different thing than marrying off a sixteen year old to a middle aged man.
Yes, there are different types of grooming and there are different types of abuse.
It is still grooming and still abuse.
I listen to a podcast by a licensed therapist (Dr Laura Anderson, Sunday School Dropouts) who specializes in helping people recover from religious trauma, and honestly, she does argue that high control religion works a lot like the dynamics of abusive personal relationships. She also notes that when people are used to being shamed/coerced/guilted/etc for religious reasons, they're more likely to accept abusive behaviors in personal relationships as well--it's already normal stuff. And most of the arguments I've heard in favor of preserving child marriages comes from religious folks asking "what happens when a 15 year old gets pregnant, the baby needs both a father and a mother!" Instead of wanting to use investigation or nuance, child marriages are a quick fix to always complicated situations.
It's not nearly as different as you seem to think.
This is abuse, full stop. If a child (16 is a child) marries an adult, even if the age gap is only a few years, that means a child is expected to have sex with an adult who should know better. That child cannot understand what they’re getting into.
I’m saying this from experience. I was married at 16 to a 22 year old. I thought I knew what I was doing, but I did not. I was intelligent – precociously so – and from a middle class family. It should not have been allowed, and it fucked up my life in ways I could not possibly have predicted.
There’s no such thing as a benign child marriage.
The great irony I find is that the scriptures encourage not pursuing romance and marriage until after the "bloom of youth"... basically, wait until you are fully mature and no longer ravenously thirsty for it, as teenagers and early 20's often are.
It's rather sad that parents are trying to push their kids to start families before they're even out of high school or gotten into college/trade school/work yet. What makes them think their kid will be able to juggle the attention needed to be a good marriage partner while also putting everything they got into school or trying to get work? Especially if they have kids early on?