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.

Marriage Savers is a Proven Way to Increase the Success of Marriage, Reduce Divorce Rates, and Provide a Better Environment for Children to Thrive.

STEP 1: We Help Establish Community Marriage Policy® (CMP)programs in cities and towns throughout the United States and Canada, in which pastors, priests and rabbis join together to strengthen marriages with the conscious goal of pushing down the community's divorce rate. WHY? So far, more than 200 cities and towns in 43 states have created Community Marriage Policies and divorce rates have fallen an average of 17.5%, and cohabitation by a third.

STEP 2: We Establish Marriage Savers Congregations in churches and synagogues throughout the United States and Canada, in which mentor couples are trained to help other couples prepare for a lifelong marriage, strengthen all existing ones, and restore troubled marriages. WHY?This strategy can virtually eliminate divorces in the local congregation.

STEP 3: We Enrich Existing Marriages and Restore Troubled Ones. Mike & Harriet McManus regularly conduct Marriage Enrichment Weekends on weekends at local churches. They also train "back-from-the-brink" couples who once considered divorce, to create a "Restoration Marriage Ministry."

http://www.marriagesavers.org/sitems/SavingMarriages/index.htm

Dr. Linda Malone-Colon establishes National Center on African American Marriages and Parenting with the mission of strengthening families in the African American Community

The historical and current-day strengths of Black marriages, parenting and families and the essential and foundational role that they have played in black child, adult and community well-being and uplift are a testament to their significance. These strengths coupled with the crisis now evident in many African American family relationships are presenting Americans with extraordinary opportunities and responsibilities to ensure that these marriage and family relationships are encouraged and supported.

The mission of National Center on African American Marriages and Parenting is to strengthen families in the African American community by helping African Americans gain essential knowledge, skills and other resources required for building and sustaining healthy marriages and practicing effective parenting.

http://www.hamptonu.edu/ncaamp/

Advocates Shed Light on the Practice and Impact of Cohabitation-- And How the Church Can Change It

In today’s culture, the fact that more than five million couples are living together outside of marriage doesn’t come as a shock to many. It should. Studies show the mere act of cohabiting before marriage increases a couples odds of divorce by 50 percent.

Consider these recent statistics: 62 percent of couples who married in 2002 were living together. Yet 86 percent of all couples are married by clergy. "I've asked thousands of clergy in scores of cities if they've ever spoken on this issue from the pulpit,” write Mike and Harriet McManus in their new book "LIVING TOGETHER: MYTHS, RISKS & ANSWERS" (Howard Books / A Division of Simon & Schuster; Hardcover; March 4, 2008; ISBN: 1-4165-5098-4; $19.99). “One in fifty raises a hand...What explains the church's abject capitulation on this moral issue?"

The McManuses cite two reasons: “Protestant pastors are competing with one another for new members and are loathe to make demands that might lose new prospects... (Also) in fairness to ministers, most simply don’t know how to address the sensitive issue of cohabitation.”

In "LIVING TOGETHER," the McManus’ show how churches can offer a proven strategy they developed to help couples test their relationship in a more effective way by taking a premarital inventory, meeting with a trained Mentor Couple to discuss the issues it surfaces, and learning how to resolve conflict amicably and thus move into healthy, rewarding, long-term marriages.

http://www.marriagesavers.org/sitems/Press/index.htm

The availability of The Marriage Index as a means of assessing the health of marriage is a most welcome development. As Maggie Gallagher, president of the National Organization for Marriage, comments, "It's a brilliant conceptual idea, long overdue. This is a GDP for marriage, a way to statistically sum up complex trends in a way that allows us to capture a core truth: Is marriage getting weaker or stronger?"

www.albertmohler.com

http://www.albertmohler.com/2009/11/02/the-marriage-index-a-revealing-look-at-the-nation/

Send your letter to the editor to feedback@tothesource.org.