Glenn Williams

A curious thing has been happening in our Western Nations.

• At the very time when the medical, psychological and social sciences have given us an absolute wealth of solid research on the hundreds of ways that marriage uniquely benefits every important measure of well-being for men, women and children… (Most of you are quite familiar with the Herculean strength and breadth of that literature.)

• At the very time when our sure and collective knowledge of how to develop and maintain strong, healthy marital relationships has never been greater, or more practical…

• At the very time when young men and women are still highly likely to say that marriage is an important life goal for themselves and that three-quarters of men and women in most countries reject the idea that “marriage is an outdated institution”…

At this historically unprecedented time…

our collective behaviors betray every one of these hopeful facts.

Marriage’s alternatives are all growing dramatically while marriage rates are consistently declining demographically.

We could all recite the disturbing statistics, but I think it is more instructive for us to look at the current state of marriage by a different measure. A more personal one, closer to home.

Think of family, friends and neighbors you know around you, and ask yourself:

• How many of them are struggling with their marriages?

• How many are facing divorce?

• How many are dealing with issues of infidelity and pornography?

• How many have allowed bitterness and other relational cancers fester to the point of nearly destroying their family?

If you are like me, it is not a pretty story.

Currently, my wife and I know 8 couples around us whose marriages have died, are dying, or are in very critical trouble.

This is very disturbing.

If we didn’t know any better, one could imagine that marriage is being specifically targeted for destruction these days.

But the decline of marriage is not like some natural disaster that comes upon us, beyond our control...

We are well in control of it…

in the things we believe,

in the choices we make,

in the things we allow to happen to us.

But we must ask this question…

Why do our behaviors – the decisions and choices we make - run so contrary to both our own personal desires and what we know is good for us?

This is a deep human question, but one that we cannot ignore.

A year ago, one of our staff at Focus on the Family asked a small, informal group of leading family sociologists from various ideological perspectives an important question. He asked these scholars,

“Can you think of any of the family formation changes we have seen in the West in the last 40 years that have improved any important measure of child well-being?”

The group got a very curious “now, that’s a good question” look on their faces, and each thought about it for a few moments.

They were surprised to be unable to recall any way that the decline of marriage and the growth of these alternative family forms have enhanced the well-being of our children.

In fact, they have significantly diminished every important measure of adult and child well-being.

I ask you to think about that?

Here’s another question I would like to pose:

If these changes – these decisions we are making about our own lives -- are not helping our children, why are we increasingly making them?

Regardless of how we might like to redefine marriage and the family to our own adult desires and wishes – whether it be heterosexual or homosexual redefinition, for both have had their hands in this troubling pot – this universal human institution will not allow us this hubris.

Marriage is much larger and more consequential than our individual or collective desires.

Two very key documents from the United Nations recognize the foundational role of marriage in both family and society. We do well to recognize them.

Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes the fundamental and essential nature of a very particular form of family:

“Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family.”

 “The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.”

It is not accidental - nor is it the moralistic influence of some fringe religious group – that this document states the right to marry just before the right to found a family.

Principle 6 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child asserts:

The child… shall, wherever possible, grow up in the care and under the responsibility of his parents… A child of tender years shall not, save in exceptional circumstances, be separated from his mother.

A fundamental right of the child is be raised by his or her mother and father.

A right, not a mere preference!

________________

My topic today is “Marriage as the basis of family life.”

But it is my conviction that to be true to what marriage really is and does, we need to talk about marriage in a much larger context.

We must recognize marriage, not just as the basis for family life,

but as the basis of human existence and thriving.

“…human existence and thriving.”

And marriage is this irreplaceable basis.

As such, we must recognize that marriage is not exclusively a religious, legal, romantic or even merely personal institution.

Of course, it often touches each of these, but marriage is a human institution. 

Anthropologists are not inclined to make universal statements about human experience, but they do find it in all cultures at all times…and as a union which brings male and female together to secure the family and contribute to the good of the community.

And as such, its primary function is to bridge the human divide between these two remarkable creatures we call male and female, demonstrating how these two not only desire, but in fact, require each other.

In no human institution do male and female cooperate as closely, fully, deeply and intimately, learning to forge out a life together, as marriage calls us to do.

How do we produce the next healthy, educated, productive, compassionate and happy generation of humanity and our particular society?

It is not going to automatically come along like the 5:15 train.

Every culture has to face this question, being very intentional to produce the next generation of tax-payers, care-givers, educators, parents, community leaders, innovators and creators.

And none has found a way to do this well without the foundation of marriage.

Natural marriage, as a public institution, does four primary and essential tasks in every human culture.

1. Marriage socializes men

2. Marriage regulates sexuality

3. Marriage protects women from predatory males

4. Marriage provides a mother and father for children

It is important to understand and remember these:

Let’s examine these four universal social needs quickly:

1) Marriage socializes men.

Anthropologists tell us that a society’s most pressing and original problem is the unattached male. Either marriage or prisons are the only answers to this problem. And no, they are not the same thing!

UC Berkeley economist George Akerlof, addressed this topic in a prestigious lecture just over a decade ago, saying “the behavior of single and married men is quite different.”

He finds that married men are more attached to the labor force, on average earn higher wages each year they are married, have less substance abuse, commit less crime and are less likely to be the victims of crime, have better physical and psychological health, live longer and are less likely to be victims of a serious accident. Akerlof explains that single men are nearly six times more likely to go to prison than married men, and are four to five times more likely to be a victim of crime themselves.

Also ladies, Professor Akerlof finds that married men are twice as likely to be a member of a book group, have visited a museum or gallery and significantly more likely to have attended the opera or symphony in the last year.

He found cohabitation was incapable of providing these benefits. Akerlof explains this is because, “men settle down when they get married and if they fail to get married, they fail to settle down.”[1]

As a quick side note, University of Texas sociologist Debra Umberson’s research on social control reveals that wives are much more effective at molding men’s behavior than their mothers.

Wives domesticate men!

2) Marriage regulates sexuality.

By socializing men, marriage also regulates sexuality. Marriage establishes sexual guardrails which every successful society requires. We cannot survive with everybody doing whatever they want, sexually or otherwise.

Societies that weaken these sexual standards end up with weakened communities. 

The noted Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin observed that civilizations with more restrained sexual mores tend to exhibit greater creative growth in culture, religion and technology. Those who have a more relaxed sexual regiment will see a declining level of cultural creativity and energy.

British anthropologist Joseph Daniel Unwin, in studying the connection between sexual mores and cultural health, found largely the same thing, calling it an “indubitable fact.” He explained,

So close, in fact, is the relation between sexual opportunity and cultural condition that if we know what sexual regulation a society adopted, we can prophesy accurately the pattern of its culture.

Marriage enforces monogamy and monogamy elevates cultural progress.

3)  Marriage protects women from exploitive males.

When a culture does not have or fails to enforce a norm of monogamy, women are likely to become commodities — things to be collected, used and then discarded.

Marriage also serves to protect women by both socializing men and regulating sex, thus leveling the sexual playing field between men and women.

A wealth of research, controlling for all the important confounding factors, shows that abuse of women by either their partners or strangers is lowest (by significant margins) in married homes and highest in cohabiting and dating situations.

Scott Coltrane, a sociologist at the University of California, studied 90 different cultures of varied socio-economic stations and found that when men are more involved in the daily tasks of family and child-rearing -- which marriage is most effective at tying them to -- the women in those cultures tend to hold greater positions of leadership and participation in public decision-making.  

Marriage protects - and even elevates - women.

4) Marriage provides mothers and fathers for children.

Healthy children define a healthy society. And marriage is the way we ensure the next generation grows up with the irreplaceable benefit of their mother and father, which the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Child guarantees, as much as possible, to every child.

A loving and compassionate society always comes to the aid of motherless and fatherless children, but a compassionate society never by intention or neglect, creates such families.

No society has found a better way than marriage to tie those who become parents to each other in a cooperative way, and that couple to their common children.

So why have we seen such a historically unprecedented decline to marriage in nearly every culture around the world?

Of course, this is a very complex and multi-layered question, but I want to offer three general reasons that serve as a start in answering this important question.

And as we did earlier, think of the couples that each of us has around us.

1. Marriage has become OPTIONAL

Marriage is no longer an assumed requirement for moving into adulthood, setting up a household or having children. It is merely one possible life choice among many.

2. Marriage has become DISPOSABLE

For those who do marry, we have lost the ideal “til death do us part.” Too often, and especially in the US, if our marriages don’t meet our expectations for happiness and personal fulfillment, we trade them in for one that hopefully will.

Story of Phil/Newsboys -- tattooed wedding ring.

Someone commented – “You know that will never come off!”

3. Marriage has become REDEFINABLE

We are redefining marriage into an institution to fulfill our own expectations. We redefined it through more liberal divorce laws, removing the “till death due us part” portion of it. We are redefining the “husband and wife” part of it. Our consumerist view redefines the “I give to you my total self” portion.

Marriage defines and forms us. Not the other way around.

3 key policy-community recommendations

I want to leave with a game plan of what we might do to recover this valuable institution: three recommendations that governments and communities can cooperate in.

1) Government and community cooperation to reduce the divorce, cohabitation and unmarried child-bearing rates by 25% in 10 years - This is certainly ambitious, but it should only really be a starting point. One of these is the death of a marriage and while the other two the establishment of family and domestic life without marriage. As we recognize, none of these do anything to enhance human well-being and they forego the mechanism which does promote it: marriage.

Example - Oklahoma Governor Keating, just before 2000, started the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative (OMI) with the goal of reducing divorces in his state by 1/3 by 2010. It has been a model program in its scope and execution, and while their goal was ambitious, they have made great gains in recovering the idea of marriage in that state and demonstrating how such work can be done well. (Research is being conducted on OMI’s gains.)

2) Developing healthy mature men – A basic requirement for a healthy marriage is a healthy man. It seems to come easier for women. And if women can’t find mature, confident men willing and able to provide for a family, women are far less likely to marry. They either delay it or merely live with the man, hoping he will become marriage-ready one day. And if the alarm on their biological clocks rings before their wedding bells, these women are increasingly choosing the baby before a husband. Our cultures must re-discover how to create marriageable men.

Example - The National Fatherhood Initiative is one group in the States that is doing very good work here, but focused on helping older teens and twenty-something men become better fathers by becoming better men. FOF works in this area as well, and Dr. Dobson has written an excellent book on the topic, Bringing Up Boys. But there are no programs or efforts I am aware of that directly help parents in the essential work of raising good, strong, healthy men from the seedlings we call boys.  

3) Intergenerational Mentoring – Related to #2 is the idea of working to link two very different generations into an important and cooperative effort. We are witnessing the twilight of an older, wiser generation of grand and great-grandparents who somehow made their marriages work and succeed.

We are also seeing the dawning of a younger generation that deeply desires to marry and succeed, but is literally paralyzed by fear at the prospect of failing at marriage like so many of their parents did.

Why not create cooperative community efforts, to take the matchless and proven wisdom of the older and download it into the lives and experiences of the younger.

Example - No one is doing this in a concerted way across a nation.

Conclusion

My friends and co-laborers, let me end with this very serious and challenging note.

We are on the cusp of loosing marriage in a generation!

There is no reason – save for our lack of resolve and willingness to cooperate – that we cannot gain it back in a generation!

We must.

No less than our collective human thriving depends on it.

Thank you.

Endnotes:

[1] George A. Akerlof, “Men Without Children,” The Economic Journal 108 (1998) 287-309.