{"id":128,"date":"2010-12-06T12:40:20","date_gmt":"2010-12-06T12:40:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/12\/solving-the-marriage-problem.html"},"modified":"2010-12-06T12:40:20","modified_gmt":"2010-12-06T12:40:20","slug":"solving-the-marriage-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/12\/solving-the-marriage-problem.html","title":{"rendered":"Solving the marriage problem"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ross Douthat today is touting<\/a> a new study<\/a>
\nfrom the University of Virginia bemoaning the decline of marriage in
\nMiddle America. OMG, the educated elite is now more committed to family
\nvalues and religion than Sarah Palin’s flyover majority–i.e. they go to
\nchurch more, get married more, and divorced less. What’s the country
\ncoming to?<\/p>\n

Douthat speculates that at least some of the explanation may lie in the
\ninflux of religious conservatives into the educated elite. (Jeez, who
\nlet them<\/i> in?) On the other hand, he (like the authors of the study) think the country’s in big trouble:<\/p>\n

The reinforcing bonds of strong families and strong religious
\ncommunities have been crucial to working-class prosperity in America.
\nYet today, no religious body seems equipped to play the kind of
\nstabilizing role in the lives of the “moderately educated middle” (let
\nalone among high school dropouts) that the early-20th-century Catholic
\nChurch played among the ethnic working class. \n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Far be it from me, as a card-carrying member of the educated elite, to
\ndisparage the bonds of kirche und kin. I do, however, think that
\nworking-class prosperity in the 20th-century owed a bit more to unions
\nand New Deal social welfare policies.<\/p>\n

Still, what to do about marriage? A few weeks ago, Pew came out with its own study<\/a>
\non the institution’s decline (which most Americans seem to regard as an
\nincrease in divorce, though divorce is also in unlamented decline).
\nPerhaps the problem is that these days the most important reason
\nAmericans give for getting married (93 percent of the married and 84
\npercent of the unmarried) is “love,” and love is getting harder to find.
\nHaving children ranks a lot lower: Only 59 percent of the married and
\n44 percent of the unmarried cite it as a “very important” reason.<\/p>\n

Yet if you ask what makes a family, children outrank love. That is to
\nsay, Americans consider even situations of which they disapprove–single
\nmoms and child-raising same-sex couples–to be families, but not
\nsame-sex or unmarried heterosexual couples living together without
\nchildren. The UVa study stays entirely away from same-sex marriage, but
\nthe data it offers makes clear that the decline in the marriage rate has
\nnothing to do with the recent appearance of SSM as a public issue (as
\nsome opponents would have you believe).<\/p>\n

So here’s the deal. If we believe that marriage is A Good Thing, we need
\nto tie it more closely to the family as we now understand it–which is
\nto say, to adults raising children. And that means, if nothing else,
\nmoving forward with SSM as quickly as possible.   <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ross Douthat today is touting a new study from the University of Virginia bemoaning the decline of marriage in Middle America. OMG, the educated elite is now more committed to family values and religion than Sarah Palin’s flyover majority–i.e. they go to church more, get married more, and divorced less. What’s the country coming to?…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nSolving the marriage problem - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/12\/solving-the-marriage-problem.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Solving the marriage problem - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Ross Douthat today is touting a new study from the University of Virginia bemoaning the decline of marriage in Middle America. OMG, the educated elite is now more committed to family values and religion than Sarah Palin’s flyover majority–i.e. they go to church more, get married more, and divorced less. What’s the country coming to?…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/12\/solving-the-marriage-problem.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-12-06T12:40:20+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Solving the marriage problem - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/12\/solving-the-marriage-problem.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Solving the marriage problem - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","og_description":"Ross Douthat today is touting a new study from the University of Virginia bemoaning the decline of marriage in Middle America. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}