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Commentary: Why Defending Marriage is Social Justice
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Erik Nelson October 16, 2003 |
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Here is a simple, stunning fact: by the time children reach adulthood in our nation, approximately 50% of them will have spent some time outside of an intact family. According to W. Bradford Wilcox, a social scientist at the University of Virginia, these children are significantly more likely than those in intact families to experience a variety of social ills: poverty, psychological problems and abuse.
For example, girls in single-parent homes are 150% more likely to become pregnant and have out-of-wedlock babies than those in intact two-parent families. They will also experience 92% more marital breakup themselves than girls raised in two-parent families. Seventy-percent of juveniles in state reform institutions come from single-parent homes.
This flies in the face of social conventions regarding divorce, family breakup, cohabitation, etc., which imply that children in these situations are “doing fine.” Much of the conventional wisdom in the 1980s tried to show that rising rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births posed essentially no threat to the well being of children.
The newest social science data indicate otherwise. Divorce, once portrayed as a means for women to escape family dysfunction, often exchanges one dysfunction for another. When marriages fail, women and children suffer. When those children grow up, they are more likely to continue in the same cycle of social dysfunction: poverty, promiscuity, disease, out-of-wedlock birth, and drug abuse. And the responsibility for dealing with those ills is disproportionately assigned to mothers.
The cohabitation model of relationships is also a failure. Few single men become dependable fathers, and thus unwed mothers are unlikely to enjoy the benefits of shared parenthood responsibilities and finances. As a result, the cohabitation relationship often leads not to equality but to the feminization of both parenting and poverty.
You might think that American churches would be alarmed by this information. But the mainline Protestant churches seem oblivious to this reality. The reason is that, at least so far, most mainline churches have largely been immune from the most detrimental effects of cohabitation and divorce. Why is this?
Class. The Protestant mainline is largely a middle and upper middle class social group whose socio-economic prosperity shields it from many of the problems that accompany marriage breakup. On the other hand, the effect among the poor, and particularly minorities, is disastrous. By the age of 30, 80% of white women have married, while only 45% of African-American women have. Among marriages whose wives were high school graduates, 32% ended by the tenth year of marriage. Only 18% of marriages by college-educated women ended at the same time. Of children born in the early 90s, non-Hispanic whites will spend on average 80% of their childhood in a married couple household. Yet Hispanic children will spend only 67%, and African American children only 16%, of their childhood with the same benefit.
In addition to the socio-economic benefits enjoyed by mainline Protestants, they also benefit from past generations of healthy marriages. Mainline Protestants today are more likely than others to have grown up in intact families. Ironically, these more liberal churches have the most traditional families, where one parent was able to stay home and provide care for the children. They have had the benefit of positive marriage role models of both a father and mother from which to learn what makes for a strong and healthy marriage.
Despite the privileges benefiting their members, mainline churches continue to advocate family policies that perpetuate poverty, violence and other social ills among the poor. At the 2000 General Convention, the Episcopal Church voted to recognize that some people do indeed live in sexual relationships outside of marriage. What was meant as a descriptive resolution was taken by progressives in the church as recognition that such relationships are indeed acceptable. The resolution was seen as liberation from an outdated taboo.
But for those struggling just to make ends meet, or youth whose parents are not able to provide a financial safety net for their children, this is not liberation but enslavement.
The disastrous results of sexual relationships outside of marriage are multiplied in the context of poverty. While an affluent family might be able to support a young daughter’s child without support from the father (or pay for that daughter’s abortion), such births among the economically disadvantaged have far more wide-ranging negative effects.
In the past decade, there has been a surge of social science investigation in the area of marriage and family life. Most of these data point to the critical role that family life plays in public life as well as the civil society of our nation. Marriage is not a merely private endeavor. Marriage has profound consequences not only for those involved directly, but for the civic, cultural, political and religious spheres of society. To deny this is to ignore the facts.
Most marriages begin in churches. But for some reason our churches have been unwilling to teach young people what it means to be married, what they need to know to be married and how to stay happily married once they have exchanged rings.
Unfortunately the mainline churches seem headed in the wrong direction. Rather than giving young people the tools to build strong and healthy marriages, the mainline seems intent on endorsing sexual relationships outside of marriage. The mainline will most likely retain its economic advantage. But it is rapidly losing the beneficial influence and example of multi-generational intact families. Looking outward, if any church is serious about addressing the pressing issues of poverty, violence, disease, abuse, and drug addiction, it cannot begin by advocating the very behaviors shown to contribute to such ills. But that is exactly what many progressives in these churches are doing.
Our churches cannot be true to their commitment to social justice if they continue down the road they are currently on. They cannot contend with poverty while turning a blind eye toward the behaviors that lead to it. Renewing and reviving the institution of marriage, which so long ago was given up on by nearly a whole generation of our church leaders, is the first step in leading young people away from poverty and violence and toward a life of hope.