November 11, 2009

A good reason why religious and lay leaders alike should look at a newly released report, The Marriage Index, co-published by the Institute for American Values and the newly established National Center on African American Marriages and Parenting (NCAAMP). Signed by a bipartisan and racially diverse group of scholars and leaders, the report proposes a tool, the Marriage Index, to assess the health of marriage as a U.S. social institution over time.

The idea is simple: sure, our finances impact individual well-being—but so does marriage. And if marriage matters, we’ll want to know how it’s faring. So just as we have Leading Economic Indicators, we should have Leading Marriage Indicators. We should keep track of them because, as dry as the data are, it represents real lives: a teenage boy whose father is nowhere in the picture, a single mom struggling to work and provide for her children, a twenty-year marriage splintered by distrust.

What are our Leading Marriage Indicators? The report proposes the following: percentage of adults married (ages 20-54), percentage of married persons “very happy” with their marriage, percentage of first marriages intact (ages 20-59), percentage of children born to married parents, and percentage of children living with their own married parents.

Of these indicators, the last two might prompt one to wonder why we should include two measures about children for a marriage index. But as the authors note, these indicators “concern more than just children: fundamentally, they reflect the link between adults and children that marriage is designed to create and secure.” As the Western Christian tradition, from Augustine to Calvin to Vatican II, has maintained, procreation and childrearing are one of the fundamental goods, or blessings, of marriage. It’s simple: when marriage works, more children will grow up with their own married parents. So if we want to know how well marriage is working, we’ll want to inquire about the children.

So what’s our marriage score today? While on some indicators marriage stabilized in the last two decades, overall the health of marriage declined dramatically in the last forty years: from 76.2 percent in 1970 to 60.3 percent in 2008. African American marriages are especially suffering. For instance, in 2008 only 39.6 percent of African American adults 20-54 were married and only 29 percent of African American children lived with their own married parents.

But rather than hang our heads and cry “Woe is marriage!” we can and must work to create a more thriving marriage culture.  And the church should be at the forefront: patiently, persuasively, and persistently making the case for marriage—to our congregations and to the broader community. How? The report includes 101 recommendations about how we can strengthen marriage, many of which pertain to religious communities. Here’s a couple:

1. Make marriage education widely available to all couples who seek it, with a special focus on low-income communities and communities of color.
2. Divinity schools and other institutes that train clergy should incorporate the best scholarship on marriage and families into their training programs.
3. Create a national Interfaith Council on Marriage devoted to strengthening marriage in U.S. houses of worship and in the nation. 
4. Organize religious congregations into Community Marriage Policies and other community partnerships for offering premarital and marriage education and for speaking with a common voice for marriage.

These recommendations are just a start. But consider the effect that this last recommendation, organizing Community Marriage Policies (CMPs), has already had in the communities that adopt them. The idea, developed by Mike and Harriet McManus of Marriage Savers, is simple: local clergy publicly agree to five components, including requiring premarital education for all engaged couples and restoring troubled marriages by partnering them with mentoring couples who survived a marital crisis. According to research, it’s estimated that cities that adopt CMPs see a modest but significant drop in the divorce and cohabitation rates compared with cities that have no CMP. So what if every community in America organized a CMP?

Also, there’s an emerging marriage movement in the African American community. For example, consider Dr. Linda Malone-Colon’s recent establishment of the NCAAMP, whose mission is to “strengthen families in the African American community.”  As their statement of values notes, “There is emerging now in our country new thoughts, new ideas, new attitudes, new leaders, new actions and a new determination and vigilance to address [the Black marriage] crisis.”

It’s hardly inevitable that marriage will only decline further. The church can publicly propose marriage with confidence, knowing that as Princeton law professor Robert George has remarked, the truth is “luminously powerful”—and surely marriage contains a truth essential to our personhood: that we find true life precisely when we give ourselves in love to another. As G.K. Chesterton said, “It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word.”

As John Paul II’s writings remind us, in a culture that preaches the gospel of individual self-fulfillment, marriage is a startling invitation to self-giving love and joyful responsibility. “Freedom exists for the sake of love,” John Paul II wrote in Love and Responsibility. “If freedom is not used, is not taken advantage of by love it becomes a negative thing and gives human beings a feeling of emptiness and unfulfillment. Love commits freedom and imbues it with that to which the will is naturally attracted—goodness.” And, “This institution [of marriage] is necessary to … testify that there is a love on which a lasting union and community can be based.”

The church has the great—and grave—vocation of being a faithful witness to the good of this lasting bond, and of reminding society that the state of our union depends a lot on the state of our unions.

Responses to: Is there life after death?

Hold on a minute, Dinesh! I haven't read your book yet but, by the interview, you haven't proven anything. First, you cut down any modern view that might bring doubt into the question of life after death by dismissing materialism, which is what modern thought is all about. You bring up that Socrates believed in the metaphysical, which hardly cuts the mustard on believing in a physical life after death. Then, you delve into the philosophical even more by playing around in the metaphysical landscape you have chosen to argue within. You still don't even approach any kind of proof in a physical life after death. You move on to morality, a subject that Christopher Hitchens has, quite rightly, explained away on anthropological grounds. It really doesn't take the finger of God on a stone tablet for a people to decide that honoring parents, not murdering, stealing, or committing adultery are to be punished in any society that seeks its own self-preservation. It could be that morality exists because it works, not because some metaphysical being will judge us. Then, when you do move on to the scientific realm of thought, you go to out-of-body experiences, many of which have been explained away as natural phenomena created by the brain in distress, strikingly similar because the human brain, when put under that particular kind of stress, acts in ways we have not codified and labeled yet. Then, you move on to talk about multi-dimensional space, and move deftly right where a materialist wants you to be. If there are, indeed, many dimensions; then what we call God could actually be our contact with another physical dimension, our misunderstanding of natural phenomena. Religion is, therefore, simply the retreat of the ignorant and uninformed who yearn to have an answer for that which the rational mind has not yet discovered. It is not, by that reckoning, The Truth. I hope that you don't plan to go onto the debate circuit with these arguments. Those of us with faith will continue to extend our faith to a God Who reveals Himself in His Word and in His creation, not in rational arguments and materialism. Doggone it all anyway! - John White

D'Souza responds: This letter basically raises each of my major arguments which by the nature of an interview can only be previewed. In other words, interviews are appetizer but the book contains the full argument. This fellow hasn't read the book and is only rebutting the interview. If he wants to understand my reasoning he can read the book.

David Lapp
David Lapp is a research assistant at the Institute for American Values, a nonpartisan think tank. His research interests include courtship, marriage, and the family, and his writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal. Lapp graduated from The King’s College in New York City with a bachelor’s degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. A newlywed, he lives with his wife in Queens, New York, and is a member of Christ Church, an evangelical Anglican community.