Is There Hope For Marriage?

The cover article for the July 13th edition of TIME Magazine headlined with this question: “Is there hope for the American marriage?” The article was written by Caitlin Flanagan, who is a columnist known for her ability to stir up controversy by pointing out some of the more disturbing and ridiculous aspects of American family life. In the article, Flanagan claims that one of her principal provocations for writing on the subject of marriage was the announced separation of Jon and Kate Gosselin. She says that she had come to have a mild sympathy and respect for the couple who were, in her words, “dedicated not to making themselves happy but to taking care of the cavalcade of children they had produced, they were laboring at something more significant than their own pleasure.”1 In light of the general decay of marriage in America in general, Flanagan found encouragement in the fact that Jon and Kate could stay the course under some extraordinary circumstances. It gave her hope, in a symbolic way, that perhaps marriage did still have some staying power as an institution. Then came the announcement that the Gosselins had filed for divorce. Flanagan subsequently watched as they were “catapulted to the forefront of trash culture” and began to “command more attention now that their union [was] broken than they did when it was intact.”2 This story, combined with the recent revelations of extramarital dalliances by South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and former Vice Presidential nominee John Edwards, led Flanagan to do little soul searching on behalf of the United States and ask whether marriage has any real future in this country.

Her research led her to observe the following rather disturbing distinctive of family life in the U.S. :

“In the past 40 years, the face of the American family has changed profoundly. As sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin observes in a landmark new book called The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today, what is significant about contemporary American families, compared with those of other nations, is their combination of ‘frequent marriage, frequent divorce’ and the high number of ‘short-term co-habiting relationships.’ Taken together, these forces ‘create a great turbulence in American family life, a family flux, a coming and going of partners on a scale seen nowhere else. There are more partners in the personal lives of Americans than in the lives of people of any other Western country.’ … the intact, two-parent family remains our cultural ideal, but it exists under constant assault. It is buffeted by affairs and ennui, subject to the eternal American hope for greater happiness, for changing the hand you dealt yourself. Getting married for life, having children and raising them with your partner — this is still the way most Americans are conducting adult life, but the numbers who are moving in a different direction continue to rise. Most notably, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in May that births to unmarried women have reached an astonishing 39.7%.

How much does this matter? More than words can say. There is no other single force causing as much measurable hardship and human misery in this country as the collapse of marriage. It hurts children, it reduces mothers' financial security, and it has landed with particular devastation on those who can bear it least: the nation's underclass.”3

This final observation has particular resonance in light of the debates that surround social policy in the U.S. The vast majority of social services money4 that is spent by American government institutions is aimed at counteracting the corrosive effects of broken marriages and families. In other words, the government would save an enormous amount of money if marriages and families were more stable. The monetary impact, however, pails in comparison to the personal aftermath of broken homes. Flanagan points out that, “on every single significant outcome related to short-term well-being and long-term success, children from intact, two-parent families outperform those from single-parent households … in all cases, the kids living with both parents drastically outperform the others.”5 This should not be read as a prophecy that children in single-parent homes are all going to wind up with a substance abuse problem or in trouble with law enforcement, but it does indicate that broken marriages have definite consequences that must be faced honestly. This is especially true because, as Flanagan points out, it is becoming increasingly clear that affluence can not insulate families from the aftermath of divorce. Consider the following excerpt from her article:

“Few things hamper a child as much as not having a father at home … This turns out to be true across the economic spectrum. The groundbreaking research on the effects of divorce on children from middle- and upper-income households comes from a surprising source: a Princeton sociologist and single mother named Sara McLanahan, who decided to study the fates of these children with the tacit assumption that once you control for income, being part of a single-parent household does not adversely affect kids. The results — which she published in the 1994 book Growing Up with a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps — were surprising. ‘Children who grow up in a household with only one biological parent,’ she found, ‘are worse off, on average, than children who grow up in a household with both of their biological parents, regardless of the parents' race or educational background.’

The consequences for more-affluent kids tend to be far less devastating than for poor ones; they are less likely to become teenage parents and high school dropouts. But children of divorced middle-class parents do less well in school and at college compared with underprivileged kids from two-parent households. ‘There's a 'sleeper effect' to divorce that we are just beginning to understand,’ says David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values. It is an effect that pioneering scholars like McLanahan … have devoted their careers to studying, revealing truths that many of us may find uncomfortable. It's dismissive of the human experience, says Blankenhorn, to suggest that kids don't suffer, extraordinarily, from divorce: ‘Children have a primal need to know who they are, to love and be loved by the two people whose physical union brought them here. To lose that connection, that sense of identity, is to experience a wound that no child-support check or fancy school can ever heal.’"6

It is fascinating that an article with sentiments like these ever found its way onto the cover of TIME Magazine. It may indicate that there are serious concerns, even within secular publishing circles, about where our concepts of marriage are heading and what consequences those concepts may bring with them. Sadly, the Church’s failure to speak with clarity and live with conviction concerning the subject of marriage and family have given proponents of “alternative marital norms” reason to suspect that what Christians call a biblical view of marriage and family is really an arbitrary personal preference masquerading as a timeless mandate from God. May God give us both clarity and conviction to speak and live in such a way that others see that marriage, as God intends it, is something for which we can have enormous hope.

1 From Time article: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1908243,00.html
2 Same as above.
3 Same as above.
4 With the exception of eldercare.
5 See Time article above.
6 Same as above.