Why We Couldn't Get Along

The big news was supposed to be that leaders from the nation's two largest religious denominations, Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists, were joining with the president of the largest umbrella group of evangelicals (National Association of Evangelicals) and mainline Protestants (National Council of Churches) to affirm their common commitment to marriage as a God-ordained "holy union of one man and one woman in which they commit, with God's help, to build a loving, life-giving, faithful relationship that will last a lifetime."

This "Christian Declaration on Marriage" was occasioned and driven by the various religious denominations' deep concern that our society "is threatened by a high divorce rate, a rise in cohabitation, a rise in non-marital births, a decline in the marriage rate, and a diminishing interest in and readiness for marrying." Grieved and alarmed by the "adverse impact of these trends on children, adults, and society," the Declaration committed the various religious communions "to help couples begin, build, and sustain better marriages, and to restore those threatened by divorce."

The Declaration on Marriage did not say everything that any of these faith communions believed about marriage. Southern Baptists, for example, have an entire article on "the family" in their "Baptist Faith and Message" confessional statement. Instead, the Declaration stated both what we held in common about marriage and our shared alarm about the negative impact that failed marriages inflict upon society in general and the weakest and most defenseless among us in particular--the children.

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