The Sexual Revolution: A Brief Report in Progress

I grew up in an era when sexual freedom first intoxicated a generation. It made a perfect match between individualism and technology, loosening the communal ties that bound us.

Thanks to technology we had learned how to have sex without making babies, and we had learned to cure diseases passed on through sex. Liberated from nasty side-effects, people could pursue pleasure without fear. And, many did.

These developments attracted a lot of media fascination, and many denunciations from pulpits. It was a dramatic time, but in the end less confrontational than you might think. The culture mainly groaned and made room for the new ways. Unsupervised coed dorms became the norm. Playboy became the winking bad boy of mainstream culture.

I don’t think it occurred to many people that marriage would really change–only the double standards and hypocrisy of relations leading up to marriage. There had always been hanky panky. Now it was normalized.

So the second wave of the sexual revolution came as a surprise: a dramatic increase in divorce. That wasn’t planned. Again, though, society groaned and rolled over. Experts opined that it was probably good for the children not to be raised in unhappy circumstances; and certainly good for the unhappy partners to leave each other behind.

Simultaneously a revolution was occurring in homosexual behavior: out of the closet, defiantly out of the closet, for a time engulfed in extraordinary displays of promiscuity, eventually settling down, almost, into happy domesticity.

Abortion also became mainstream: often grieved in private, but widely practiced and accepted in public.

We had, by the end of the eighties, generally accepted premarital sexual activity and an unprecedented divorce rate. But in most people’s minds, the fundamental structure still hadn’t changed. Eventually most people got married. Children were produced by married couples.

However, the revolution kept rolling, and it is rolling still. Divorces continued, and the children of divorce were even more prone to divorce, or never to marry in the first place. The scandal of out-of-wedlock babies gradually disappeared. First those young mothers were treated with sympathy; then with admiration. Today, fathers are optional and babies come through many avenues. Test-tube babies, surrogate mothers, lesbian couples producing babies with the help of artificial insemination–once the province of science fiction these choices are all absolutely mainstream today. Young couples not only have sex without a thought of marriage, they live together not as a prelude to marriage but simply as a state of preference or convenience. Weddings are a possible event in the life of a couple, but marriage and partnership are now only loosely connected.

It goes further. The very nature of male and female has come under question. People can and do change gender.

Since my college days alarmists have been predicting that the dominos will continue to fall. They have been consistently proved right. What seemed impossible a generation back–gay marriage? gender transformation?–has come true.

And Christians, while still serving as alarmists, really don’t have much to say. For one thing, by most measures Christians behave much like everybody else. More importantly, nobody much cares what Christians think. We can perhaps scare and shock the believers, but we can’t even get a faint rise in the pulse rate of anybody else. The culture has moved on.

**

I sometimes used to think the pendulum would swing back, but we’ve lived with some pretty horrendous consequences of the sexual revolution– millions dead of AIDS, a fatherless generation–and there’s not the slightest sign of retreat. What I foresee is more. Whatever structures remain are on shaky ground.

The chief remaining taboos–rape, sexual harassment, child sex abuse, child pornography, man-boy relations–have in common that there is a youthful or non-consenting victim. Maybe that reservation will hold. We’ll see.

I’m not trying to scare anybody. I’m past the alarmist stage. I am just waking up and asking myself: how does one live as a Christian in a truly post-Christian society? In some areas–human rights for example–there is reason for encouragement that post-Christian society has continued to advance Christian values. But sex is pretty basic stuff. Fidelity has some appreciation. Chastity has very little.

My question isn’t finally about sex. It’s more about identity. Do we abandon traditional mores and adapt our expectations to a new situation? Do we become “anonymous Christians,” as I understand is common in Sweden? Do we form strict, isolated counter-cultural colonies, as the Amish do? Do we preach an unrelentingly unpleasant message on the streets, as Jeremiah did?

I’m asking myself, “What would Jesus do?”

Why Marriage?

My daughter got married a few weeks ago. Having participated in planning this wonderful extravaganza I can assure you that weddings are not an endangered species. Marriages are. During the same period that weddings have grown so much more elaborately celebrative—and so much more expensive–we have seen the bottom dropping out of marriage in America. Divorce, cohabitation, singleness, all up. Intact marriages, down. We’re not yet where Scandinavia is, but we’re getting there fast.

When I was growing up, one’s life plan was captured in a jingle: first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Mary with a baby carriage. Looking around at the wedding party for my daughter, that jingle didn’t appear fully operative. For many, the “marriage” part was tentative and delayed, and the sequence of events was jumbled.

Which doesn’t mean that men and women will stop pairing up in relatively stable ways. Some things don’t change. The tendency of men and women to become lasting partners is a function of our natures.

So are the infidelity and discord that destroy many such relationships. These also are cross-culturally robust, and a consistent feature of relationships between men and women through history. Our draw toward monogamous, heterosexual partnerships and our draw toward that which destroys those partnerships will continue to collide, as they always have. So I expect.

The change comes in societal supports for lasting partnerships, the religious and social mores that create expectations of permanence, and disapproval and opposition to breaking apart. These have grown weak. A lot of people would say: if people love each other and want to marry, we will celebrate with them, but if they don’t want such commitments, or if they feel they can’t sustain such commitments any longer, “no problem.”

Why fight for marriage? Why make it a societal project? Why take sides for marriage, and against dissolution?

Jeff and Janet Johnson, both long-time mentors of my daughter, shared the officiating in my daughter’s wedding. Janet made the case for marriage:

Your love is priceless and needs to be guarded.  Selfishness, pride, lack of forgiveness and inattentiveness are but some of the many thieves capable of stealing away your love. In a sense your marriage is like a treasure chest forming a protective casing around your love, preventing your love from being stolen. Treasure chests have hard sides. The hardness protects what is on the inside…

Many people live with the false assumption that love enables a marriage to survive. But that is not the case. Your love will not ensure your marriage will survive; it is your marriage which will ensure your love will survive. This is the very reason God ordained marriage. Marriage keeps love alive, not love keeps marriage alive.

I would add that the love protected in marriage is more than the feelings of one partner for the other. It involves a broader community of interest: children, neighbors, church, extended family. That community suffers when a marriage breaks, or if a marriage never forms. It loses some measure of reassurance, security, stability, and delight.

That is why our communities should fight for marriage, to do what can be done in a gentle way to sustain and protect marriages. I say gentle. I don’t favor the savage sanctions of some earlier eras. They left such a bitter taste that they undermined their own purposes. And they were often unjust. Surely, though, there are good and gentle ways to show our tireless support for marriage, ways that enhance human flourishing.

Changes in the Culture Wars

Don’t miss Ross Douthat’s column in the New York Times (here) in which he comments on a changing social scene. I’ve written before about the confounding fact that college graduates tend to have lasting, stable marriages, while less educated Americans are frequently foundering. (See The Champions of Marriage, particularly.) Douthat notes the odd way this has fit into the convenient summary of culture wars: white-collar social liberals versus blue-collar cultural conservatives. The paradox was that “highly educated Americans live like Ozzie and Harriet despite being cultural liberals, while middle America hews to traditional values but has trouble living up to them.”

Douthat’s reading of the latest data (particularly from The National Marriage Project) suggests that the class divide is changing. The educated elite are growing more religious and more socially conservative, possibly because evangelicals are  better educated. (He says they are now among the nation’s best-educated sub-groups. That’s a shock.) Culture wars are becoming a battle between two camps in the elite–” pitting Wheaton and Baylor against Brown and Bard, Redeemer Presbyterian Church against the 92nd Street Y, C. S. Lewis devotees against the Philip Pullman fan club.” (If you think Douthat doesn’t know the turf, consider that string of cultural shibboleths.)

But, he says, the less-educated are being left out of the discussion of what marriage means. For those who never made it through college, marriage is increasingly irrelevant. Evangelicals have moved up, but they have not managed to maintain a moral influence among the middle and lower classes in the way that the Catholic church did in the early twentieth century. (And, I would add, the way the Methodist and Baptist churches did in the 19th century.)

I think he’s right, and that’s a terrific challenge to all evangelicals.

Another Study on Living Together

The New York Times reports yet another study showing that cohabitation increases the chances of divorce. The likelihood of divorce within ten years increases by six percent if the couple first lived together. Only half of couples who live together get married within three years–most of the others split–and if they do get married their chances of divorce are higher. Nonetheless,an increasing majority of couples follow the path of living together first. Why? Maybe because you don’t have to make a decision.

The Elite 20%

David Brooks and Gail Collins have a very interesting exchange in today’s New York Times. (here) Collins offers a narrative of post-WWII America’s boom times for ordinary Americans followed by (since the 70s) a persistent squeeze. Brooks sets this story within another narrative, the divergence between the highly educated (the elite 20%) who are doing very well and the rest of Americans.

What I found particularly interesting was Brooks’ suggestion that this elite 20% not only do well financially, they also dominate our public culture. Since advertisers are wild to get at them and their wallets, their tastes dominate the media. When the 80% watch those same media, they develop the same elite tastes (for bigger houses, vacations in Cancun, flat screen TVs, and so on). The 80% don’t have incomes to sustain those tastes, though, so they borrow. And then, it all blows up, as it did this year.

Here’s what I’d add: the 20% not only dictate the culture of acquisitiveness, they dictate a culture of unlimited freedom. In particular, they dictate a culture of sexual freedom. Watch TV and ask yourself: what are the ethics of sexuality in this society?

The elite, for whatever reasons, can handle this freedom. They marry and still have a low divorce rate. Even if they do divorce, they have the income and personal stability to manage the consequences. But the 80% do not. Their divorce rates are well over 50%, and so well over half their kids grow up with only one biological parent. This produces a high quotient of personal problems, which reinforces tendencies to quit school early and earn less money.

It’s an ugly cycle that tends to reinforce itself.  I wish I knew what to do about it.

What Matters Most—Part 5 on Sexuality

From a purely empirical point of view, marriage matters tremendously. Children who are raised by two biological parents do dramatically better, on average, than children who get the advantage of only one biological parent. Yes, it’s possible that a high-conflict marriage or an abusive marriage is worse than divorce for children (though statistically I don’t think that’s proven), and yes, it’s possible that divorcing parents who act nicely to each other may greatly reduce the injuries their children suffer (though I don’t think you can demonstrate that statistically either). And yes, I know that some marriages are so hopeless that permanent separation or divorce is the only real possibility. All the same, let’s not kid ourselves. Marriages that last are far better, on average, than any other environment for children.

But then, who needs convincing? Certainly not the people who line up to get married in elaborate ceremonies every summer. They want their marriages to last. In fact, most of them have a hard time imagining how they wouldn’t.

Heck, even single parents—the 17-year-old mothers who dropped out of high school to have their baby, the 25-year-old father of three kids by three different women—they too think fondly of marriage that lasts. It didn’t happen to work out in their case, but they aren’t quite done hoping that it might yet.

Everybody wants good marriages, but these days nobody knows how to make them. This is the major reason the devastating statistics about the impact of marriage and divorce on kids aren’t widely known. What’s the point of disseminating bad news if you don’t know what to do about it?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think nobody knows how to stop the wild acceleration of divorce, cohabitation and single parenting in America. Don’t look to Planned Parenthood for help. And don’t look to churches, either, since for all their emphasis on lasting marriages, their performance level is only marginally higher than the rest of society.

Too many factors work against marriage:

-the eroticization of everything

-the idolization of individual choice, individual pleasure and individual destiny

-the rise of co-ed everything, and the increased possibility of unfettered privacy for unmarried couples

-the normalization of premarital sex

-the normalization of cohabitation

-the normalization of divorce

American society places a premium on individual satisfaction, while broadcasting a view of life that puts sex at the apex. With easy opportunity for sex, and no societal barriers to either sex or cohabitation between willing adolescents or adults, normalcy has been redefined to mean a variety of sexual relationships with marriage as a possible addition—a capstone to the best of relationships.

If you don’t find the best of relationships, you can have plenty of sex anyway. And if the best of relationships at some point stops being the best of relationships, you can drop the marriage. It always was optional.

Some heroic individuals will resist that—today’s New York Times has an article about Florida quarterback Tim Tebow and his plan to wait until marriage to have sex—but they are quite unusual. And truthfully, marriage is difficult. Relationships are difficult. They always have been. Most things that matter are. Without much societal support, don’t expect a dramatic change in the failure rate.

So what do we do?

We keep fighting. The value of marriage is too great to give up.

The fight goes on at two levels. One is to help marriages through their difficulties. Beginning with premarital counseling, and going on through classes and literature and mentoring and personal counseling, we do everything we can to help couples make strong marriages, and keep them strong.

Another level is through teaching. Two things matter, and we have to keep telling people that they matter.

Young people, rather naturally, will not agree with their elders on all kinds of lifestyle questions. They will want to listen to and sing different music, they will dabble in different religious pathways and will experiment with drugs and alcohol.  They will entertain new ideas that horrify their parents. They will tattoo their bodies and wear clothes intended to shock. They will use terrible language. They will gamble. They will smoke cigars. All of these matter, but they can be undone.

Marriage cannot be undone. It is too serious to “get over.” That is among the implications of Jesus’ words in Matthew 19: 1-12.

Sex cannot be undone, either. This is the point Paul tried to get across to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 6:12-20). When two people have sex there is an exchange that affects both persons’ core. There is simply no room for experimentation, in Paul’s view. Sex is never casual.

One might add that children cannot be undone.  Marriage leads to children. Sex leads to children. The consequences for those children of marriages that do not last, or sex that is uncommitted, are absolutely immense.

It’s not just for children’s sake that we say these things, however. In fact, it’s notable that the Scriptures hardly mention children in these matters. The things themselves—marriage and sex—have overwhelming and irreversible impact on the people involved.

There is a better way, We live in a society that works powerfully against that way, and no group, no individual, is immune from society’s impact. But then, no group and no individual is immune from the next pandemic. We still do our best to fight the plague.

What’s Driving Divorce–Part 3

A persistently troubling fact for evangelical Christians is that their divorce rate is similar to other Americans’. Pollster George Barna publicized this many years ago and it has become one of those rare statistical findings known by everybody. Barna’s most recent research (March, 2008) shows evangelicals slightly less likely to divorce than the general public (28% of once-married evangelicals are now divorced, versus 33% of the general public) but Barna has a very narrow definition of evangelical. What most people call “evangelical” is what he calls “born again,” and for them divorce is as common as for the general public, according to his findings.
I doubt any group of Americans is more pro-marriage than evangelical Christians, nor does any group offer more resources to strengthen marriages than do evangelical churches. Yet they still get divorced in high numbers.
Judging by Barna’s research (http://barna.org/barna-update/article/15-familykids/42-new-marriage-and-divorce-statistics-released) the divorce rate is bad for just about everybody but Asians (20%) and “upscale” (22%). For some reason Barna doesn’t bring in education. As indicated in an earlier post, “The Champions of Marriage,” those who graduate from college have a much lower divorce rate than other Americans, and it has declined dramatically in the last decade.
But what about Christians? Do they really divorce as readily as other Americans? The answer is no, if you compare apples to apples. An active Christian who graduates from college is less likely to divorce than a non-Christian who graduates from college. A Christian high school dropout is less likely to divorce than a non-Christian high school dropout. The difference an active faith makes is significant, and the more active the faith, the more significant.
No difference in faith, however, compares to the difference made by age at marriage, level of education, and wealth. Demographics trump religion. Since evangelical Christians tend to marry earlier and have less education and less wealth than other Americans, they end up having just as many marital problems as other Americans, on average. Faith pulls them up, demographics pull them back down.
Right here is where people get stuck. If demographics are destiny, what can we do? Of course churches can continue to offer classes on marital communication, can provide marriage counseling, and can preach sermons on God’s intentions for marriage. Such moral and spiritual efforts make a difference, but not enough to stem the awful pandemic. (If you doubt the seriousness of the issue, see my earlier post, “Marriage and Children.”)

**
It’s a stretch, but Malcolm Gladwell’s article in the latest New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/10/090810fa_fact_gladwell?yrail) got me thinking. Gladwell talks about the deep South of the 1950s by discussing Big Jim Folsom, governor of Alabama, and Atticus Finch, the hero of To Kill a Mockingbird. (The novel was published at about the same time that Folsom was driven out of office by the racial polarization that came after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision.)
Folsom, according to Gladwell, treated African Americans as human beings. One of his famous (and scandalous, in Alabama) acts was to invite Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell for drinks at the governor’s mansion. Folsom did not stop at symbolic gestures; he commuted sentences against African Americans that he considered tainted by racial bias. And he encouraged African Americans to register to vote. As soon as segregationists felt genuinely threatened by civil rights, though, the system had no room for such liberalism, and he was swept out of office.
Similarly Atticus Finch was a courageous and far-sighted individual, but his kindness toward African Americans led to his contemptuous treatment of “white trash.” (I won’t go into Gladwell’s case here; you should read the article if you’re interested.) Gladwell’s basic point is that it’s not good enough to be kind and fair. If bias and mistreatment are part of the system, you have to change the system.
Here’s the connection: Right now, our American social system does not sustain marriage.  It especially does not sustain marriage for those who need it most: the poor. The poor and the poorly educated (which are virtually the same thing) are being decimated by divorce and by out-of-wedlock births. Their problems get passed on to their children, and amplified by the dearth of intact two-parent families. We’ve never really had a class system in the US, but this could be creating one.
It’s not good enough to feel strongly about marriage. It’s not good enough to offer seminars and counseling and support. You really have to change the system.
What does that mean? Well, think about what it meant in segregationist Alabama. It meant changing everything, from courtrooms to voter registration procedures to school admissions to lunchroom accommodations to job discrimination to dressing rooms in department stores. An interesting parlor game is to ask which of those areas was most crucial. What broke the back of segregation? Voting rights? School desegregation? Public accommodation? They all had to change.
We could draw up a different list for marriage. Movies and TV. Divorce law. Poverty/education. Childcare. Drugs and alcohol. Spousal abuse. Infidelity. Actually, let me throw it out there. What do you think is driving divorce in America, and how might that be changed systemically? I’d be interested to hear.

Marriage and Children–Part 2

Since the divorce explosion of the 1980s, economists, sociologists and psychologists have conducted thousands of studies of marriage. Every minute nubbin of marriage has gone under the microscope. We’ve learned a lot. Unfortunately, much of what we’ve learned remains unknown.

In a previous post—“The Champions of Marriage—Part 1”—I wrote that the college educated have a much lower divorce rate than those who don’t graduate from college. Most people think that divorce has affected all classes of Americans in roughly the same way—or even that the sophisticated, secular classes are most affected by a divorce culture. Not so. For the college educated, divorce is a disease. For the rest of American society, it is a pandemic.

Another little-known research finding can be summed up pretty simply. For children, marriage good. Everything else, bad.

Most people have a foggy idea that divorce can be hard on children, but that is like saying that jumping off high bridges offers certain health risks. Invariably, and by very large margins, studies find that to deprive a child of marriage between his biological parents, through single parenting, cohabitation, divorce, divorce and remarriage, or any other living arrangement is to greatly increase (often by two or three times) the child’s chances of living in poverty, failing in school, getting in trouble with the authorities, becoming addicted to drugs, experiencing a wide range of health problems, having a child out of wedlock, and growing up to suffer depression and relational failures of his or her own.

Powerful differences are observed at every economic level and among all ethnic groups. For example, 11% of white kids from two-parent biological families drop out of high school, versus 28% from white single-parent families or step-families. Mary Parke, a policy analyst for the Center for Law and Social Policy, reports that children of divorce are “more than twice as likely to have serious social, emotional, or psychological problems as children of intact families—25 percent versus 10 percent.”

As Harvard professors David Ellwood and Christopher Jencks put it in an often-cited 2004 paper, “Children raised by both of their biological parents did better than children raised in any alternative arrangement. There was no consistent difference between children raised by remarried mothers, divorced mothers, and never-married mothers.”

If we found a prescription drug as good for children’s welfare as marriage, the drug companies would not have to advertise. Word of mouth would have people lining up outside pharmacies in a week.

Over the past few decades Americans have learned all sorts of important information about how to protect children from harm—from crib death, from choking, from sexual predation, from peanut allergies. Too bad we know so little about the factor that outweighs all others. Gangs, drugs, chaotic schools, video games—these and other factors are readily labeled as threats to children. But unmarried parenting and divorce rarely get named as the dangers they clearly are.

As a result, kids simply don’t know. A survey of high school seniors asked whether a single woman who chooses to have a baby solo is experimenting with a worthwhile lifestyle and not affecting anyone else. Fifty-six percent said yes. Asked whether most people would have a fuller and happier life if they chose marriage over singleness or living together, only about a third agreed or mostly agreed. [“State of Our Unions” report from the National Marriage Project of Rutgers University.] A survey of teenagers by the University of Michigan asked whether “it is usually a good idea for a couple to live together before getting married in order to find out whether they really get along.” Sixty-four percent of boys and 57% of girls says yes.  [The Economist, May 24, 2007]

These beliefs are completely at odds with scientific data. I asked sociologist David Popenoe, author of the National Marriage Project’s 2007 “State of Our Unions” report, why he thought social scientists’ unanimous findings were so little known and discussed. He said, “Probably for the same reason you don’t hear many sermons on divorce. It’s controversial.” People don’t like to imply that some people’s choices are wrong. Why “blame the victim?”

I doubt that information will cure what ails us. It might be a starting point, however. Somehow college graduates “get” that marriage is a huge benefit for them and their kids. Why shouldn’t everybody know that?

The Champions of Marriage–Part 1

This is the first in what I hope will be a series of short posts on marriage.

After thousands of scientific studies of marriage, the one number everybody knows is 50%. Fifty percent of American marriages end in divorce, more or less. It’s a statistic made for pessimism and fatalism, as in “fifty percent of the people in this room will get a divorce.”

Another fact is less well known. As researchers have sliced and diced the data on marriage, they have found one group of Americans for whom marriage does not appear threatened. This group—about 25% of the population–has a low divorce rate that has dropped by half in the last decade. People in this group rarely have babies out of wedlock. They tend to marry and stay married.

As a reader of this blog, you are probably a member of this important subgroup. It is not defined by faith or pro-family beliefs. It is defined by a college education.

Approximately 25% of adult Americans have graduated from college—a number that seems to be fairly stable. Their divorce rate after ten years of marriage, as reported by The Economist in a May 24, 2007 article, has plummeted to 16.5%, just over half what it was a decade before. Only 4% of college-educated women have children out of wedlock. They tend to be pro-marriage. Whereas once college-educated women were less likely to marry than those with less education, now they are more likely.

On the other end of the scale, women who dropped out of high school have seen their ten-year divorce rate rise in the past decade, from 38% to 46%. For those who completed high school the ten-year divorce rate is also rising, though not as fast, to 38%.

How can this be, that the college educated are the champions of marriage?  Their faithfulness to marriage seems counterintuitive, since higher education tends to be a secularizing force, and the college-educated generally voice support for alternative lifestyles like gay marriage or single childbearing.

My son Silas related a startling experience at Stanford. His dorm of about 100 residents had a “get to know you” session. At one point they asked students to divide themselves according to a series of questions—how many played a musical instrument, how many had acted in a play, how many had three or more siblings, that sort of thing. One question was whether their parents were divorced. Almost everybody in the room—all but a handful—rushed to the side of “intact family.” Silas was amazed. He expected a very high divorce rate among the families of these liberal-minded students.

College graduates may think and talk very liberally, but they don’t act like all choices are equal. Most college educated people are quite careful and determined when it comes to marriage, as with most things in life.

These statistics help explain, by the way, why the intelligentsia don’t treat divorce like the plague it is. Intellectually they may know that divorce is a very common thing and a very bad thing. But in their daily experience, among their friends and colleagues, the problem is not severe. It involves significant failures and deep wounds, but only among less than one fifth of the families they know well. College-educated opinion leaders are like people who read about bad traffic, but who find that whenever they get on the freeway, traffic is light.

By all the socioeconomic indicators, America’s loss of faith in marriage has proven disastrous—bad for the people who cohabit, have babies solo, or marry only to divorce, and terrible for the children who grow up with only one biological parent. There is really little room for discussion on this point. Literally thousands of studies have been done by people who don’t necessarily start out favorable to marriage. Their findings are all but unanimous and overwhelming. Marriage good. Everything else, bad. That’s the subject of another blog post.

The question I want to address is: why do the college-educated get this so much better than the rest of us?

**

Statistics don’t reveal why college supports marriage. Surely it has little or nothing to do with what people learn in the classroom. The body of knowledge that a student gains in four years of college—whether in international relations or in electrical engineering–has little to do with keeping a marriage alive in the 21st century.

One thing does reliably happen in college, however: the student gets four years older. Statistically, those who marry at 22 are more likely to stay married than those who marry at 18. Four years make a difference in brain development and personal maturity. Just putting off marriage for college is a plus.

Also, college graduates make more money than high school graduates. Money is a major stress factor in marriages, so it makes sense that better incomes will lead to less stressful marriages.

However, this relationship with money is complex. Much of the data actually suggest that causation goes in the other direction—that successful marriages lead to better incomes. Single-parent families (those that either never married or that divorced, from all income levels) have a poverty rate five times that of two-parent biological families. Of course, this is partly explained by the fact that two adults can earn more than one. But step-families—where you do have two adults—experience poverty at almost double the rate of intact marriages.

Economist Robert Lerman looked at women from the very poorest, uneducated and unemployed backgrounds who got pregnant out of wedlock. Following them for an average of twelve years, he found that 33% would live below the poverty level at least four years out of the twelve. Some, however, got married before giving birth–a “shotgun marriage.” They subsequently had a 38% higher standard of living than those who did not marry. Twenty percent would still experience at least four years of poverty, but compared to a whopping 47% of those who did not marry, their fortunes greatly improved.

According to studies cited in The Economist, married men drink less, take fewer drugs and work harder. They earn substantially more than single men with similar education and job experience. A case can be made that marriage is the best financial tool we know—more potent even than education for helping people succeed.

Ultimately it’s a fool’s game to argue about whether education, marriage or good jobs has the greatest effect in helping people. College, marriage and higher incomes all tend to go hand in hand, and it’s hard to say what causes what.

I would suggest that you’re really looking at an aspect of character. People with certain character traits tend to stick at school, they tend to stick at marriage, they tend to do better in their jobs. By character I do not necessarily mean altruism. There are other qualities that other generations have counted important. Think of the Romans, more interested in fortitude and courage than in kindness.

What character qualities are we talking about? At least this: College graduates can defer gratification (they do their homework) because they have been taught the value of self-discipline (usually by their married parents). This makes them successful in their careers, and it makes them successful in their marriages. A college education may make college graduates less moralistic about marriage, but it doesn’t make them less practical. It doesn’t keep them from seeing that marriage pays. So they invest in it. And they know how to invest.

Kay Hymowitz makes the case that every young person needs a personal life map. The old one was simple and memorable: “first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Mary with a baby carriage.” Hymowitz says that the college-educated fiercely hold on to that map. They exert phenomenal energy in finding and securing the ideal partner, they put off marriage and children (if not sex) until they finish their education; they then marry and have children, whom they in turn supervise and train very carefully for success—education, homework, discipline, a wide understanding of the world, good relationships, a solid marriage.

Those with less education may be less pragmatic. They may not be as well equipped to act in a disciplined way. Perhaps they never learned to get their homework done. They are less likely to plan ahead, and more prone to act based on emotion.

These are generalizations, of course, with many exceptions on both sides. I give them to remind you that education is more than a matter of sitting in class. Graduates succeed not merely because they have mastered a body of knowledge, but because they have mastered themselves.

School is not the only place where self-control and forward thinking is learned, however. It is learned in families. (Some immigrant cultures, Jewish and Chinese for example, excel at it.) Sometimes it is learned in church—see the histories of Methodism and Pentecostalism for examples.

**

I have been struck by the relationship between college and marriage, because it works to correct a blind spot—my blind spot. When facing social problems, Christians tend to emphasize morality and spirituality. Regarding marriage, we emphasize what is morally right—to love each other sacrificially, to not divorce. We also emphasize the spiritual transformations that enable us to do what is right—the “come to Jesus” that can change marriage from an onerous burden to a joyful freedom.

Not to take anything away from these emphases, but we need more. Demographic studies show that American evangelicals are, on the whole, less educated than the general population. Not surprisingly, they have a high divorce rate, even though they are on average quite committed to the institution of marriage and to spiritual growth.

Faith and morality do matter, everything else being equal. A college graduate with an active faith is more likely to stay married than a non-believer or a nominal believer with a college education. An actively Christian high school dropout is more likely to stay married than an agnostic high school dropout. However, education makes considerably more difference in the divorce rate than faith does.

And that makes theological sense. Marriage is not fundamentally an institution for Christians. It is a human institution, offered by God to the whole human race, and practiced by virtually every society on the globe. Christianity changed marriage for the better in many ways, such as by emphasizing love, and seeing wives as partners, not property. But the fundamentals of marriage pertain to those of all faiths and those without one. They are strikingly practical. We sometimes blanch at how materialistically earlier generations looked at matchmaking. Marriage was as much about inheritance as about love and romance. Today, not so much has changed. Marriage is still very much about our personal and family welfare. It very much involves passing on what we have to future generations—not just property, but also commitments and lifestyle.

Faith doesn’t substitute for qualities of character, maturity, responsibility, rationality, self-control, and deferral of gratification. If we excelled in these, we wouldn’t have a divorce rate near 50%.

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I would like to frame the challenge this way: can we teach non-college-graduates to think about marriage the way college graduates do? We can’t send everyone to college. Can we pass on discipline, forward-thinking and rational self-interest in other ways? John Wesley, they say, accidentally created a generation of shopkeepers—people with the internal structures, the methods, that made them successful at business. Can we create a generation of people who stick at marriage?

It might help if we began to talk about marriage in a more practical way. It might help if we began to emphasize what a vast practical difference marriage makes. Instead of talking about love, let’s talk about benefits. In a future post, I’ll discuss that.