Double Standard

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/14/opinion/sunday/ross-douthat-the-imitation-of-marriage.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

In this op-ed Ross Douthat continues his occasional reflections on the sexual revolution and its impact on class divisions. I think he puts his finger on something fundamental.

America historically has been a highly mobile society, in which the poor, hard-working immigrant could by pluck and luck rise to the top. In the words of Carousel’s Billy Bigelow, musing about the future of his unborn son:

“He might be a champ of the heavyweights,
Or a feller that sells you glue,
Or president of the united states,
That’d be all right, too
His mother would like that
But he wouldn’t be president if he didn’t wanna be!”

That’s the old romance of freedom. My son could be a champion athlete, or a successful businessman, or president. But only if he wants to be!

As I understand it, studies show that such possibilities are considerably more remote than they used to be. The top and the bottom are more than ever permanently divided, with three factors pre-eminent: income, education, and marriage. They tend to go together. If you are well-off and well-educated, the chances are good that you will marry and not divorce. The reverse is also true: if you are poor and poorly educated, the chances are good that you will not marry or stay married, and that you will raise children alone.

The double standard in American sexuality has gone beyond male and female. Now it is between rich and poor. Those who are well off can afford sexual liberty, because there are forces in their lives that limit destruction, not least of which is the power of cash. (The movie Chef offers excellent storytelling of how this works on the ground.) Those who are poor may be destroyed by liberty, as they lose their most valuable asset, family.

The mores of the well-off dominate the cultural scene: think movie stars, TV producers, magazine editors, public intellectuals. They celebrate freedom. The background insinuation is that if only everybody could be as flexible and non-judgmental and open-minded as we are, problems would quickly dissipate.

Douthat suggests that the poor have adopted that philosophy, much to their detriment. And that its adoption by the rich is  more tempered by conservatism than is obvious. “We may have a culture in which the working class is encouraged to imitate what are sold as key upper-class values — sexual permissiveness and self-fashioning, spirituality and emotivism — when really the upper class is also held together by a kind of secret traditionalism, without whose binding power family life ends up coming apart even faster…. If so, it needs to be more widely acknowledged, and even preached, that what’s worth imitating in upper-class family life isn’t purely modern or progressive, but a complex synthesis of new and old.”

Of three fundamental factors—income (jobs), education, and marriage—that correlate and interact closely, I believe marriage has the longest and most tenacious hold on people’s welfare. Clearly there’s no returning to the “happy days” of the Greatest Generation. Birth control has changed everything. So have “softer” factors: the (partial) undoing of the gendered double standard; the rise of two-earner families; the end of blame and shame for children born without benefit of marriage; no-fault divorce; a more positive valuation of sexual desire; pornography. Many of these changes are good, some bad, some worth arguing about. Put it all together and the situation is very complicated. It’s not easy to say how on earth you could change it.

But as we think about it, we would do well to bear in mind this two-class reality: what works for the rich may devastate the poor.

The Community of Marriage

Weddings come in waves. At one time I went to my friends’ weddings. Now I go to the weddings of my friends’ kids, or my kids’ friends. This summer I’ve been to three, feeling very lucky to be invited. I am pretty sure that when young people imagine the most fabulous of weddings, they do not think of populating it with people of my age.

I had a really good time at all three weddings. They were happy and reverent occasions, with good food and drink. What’s not to enjoy? It’s meaningful to reflect on marriage, to contemplate the distance Popie and I have traveled together, and to take joy in another young pair showing the faith to embark on such a journey. When I went to my friends’ weddings, years back, I felt intense excitement, as of a crucial contest. Now I look on as though from a high mountain. I know all about the risks, the uncertainties, the thrills. But I am far from playing the game myself. I have become more a philosopher.

In my community, people hardly ever marry in church nowadays. They use wineries or parks or “event facilities.” My own church sanctuary, which once booked space months in advance, hardly ever has a wedding any more.

Furthermore, lots of weddings aren’t performed by pastors or priests; the couple get a friend or a relative to lead the service.

Furthermore, I think it is pretty unusual for the marrying couple to be anxious to get into bed that night. They have generally been doing that for a while.

All the same, my impression is that weddings have not really changed foundationally. They represent the same hope that they did when I was young–the hope of loving and ecstatic partnership, of home, children, permanence. The trappings have become more elaborate (and considerably more expensive), but they aim at the same kind of ritual celebration.

For me, what has changed is more substantial. Not being in the game, I approach weddings with a quiet mind. I enjoy the service, the food, and the happiness, but what I feast on are the conversations–with old friends, and occasionally with someone I meet. In my current stage of life weddings are not just about marriage, they are about community. We come together for the wedding and we affirm, not just the ecstatic dreams of the couple, but the gentle, sustaining community that surrounds them. We are the background. We are the binding threads. I am not invited to the day because I am so terribly important to the celebrating couple, but because it is fitting to have the wider community present. I see old friends, I establish who is related to whom, I have a stray encounter with someone I have never met and may never meet again but who is also significant to this community of which, however partially, I am a part.

It has become common in weddings I attend for the congregation to join in vow-making, stating their commitment to support the couple. In my day this was a novel and striking development. From my view now, it is merely a symbolic utterance of a bodily truth: we are here, we represent the warp and woof of your lives, and we know that what you the couple do in marrying is the sharp exclamation point jutting out of a common reality. We belong to each other.

Gay Marriage is Conservative Victory?

A very interesting column from David Brooks. He salutes gay marriage as a lone modern indicator of people voluntarily seeking to bind their freedom in commitments.

“Once, gay culture was erroneously associated with bathhouses and nightclubs. Now, the gay and lesbian rights movement is associated with marriage and military service. Once the movement was associated with self-sacrifice, it was bound to become popular.”

Gay marriage is thus a conservative victory, in his telling, and he wonders whether it will lead to a trend. ” Maybe we’ll see other spheres in life where restraints are placed on maximum personal choice.”

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?”

For This One Day

A few days ago our friend John came to see us–John whose wife Nancy died a year ago. They were a lovely pair and very close. John wanted very much to talk about Nancy and her death, showing us photos of her last days and letting us inhabit the grief he is going through. It was a great honor, and very touching, to share with him. It reminded me what marriage is meant to be.

I asked John how he managed. He said sometimes he was not sure that he could. It just seemed to be too much. But when he reflected on Nancy as a gift given him for 33 years, an extraordinary gift greater than he could ever deserve, he found that he could manage. He wasn’t sure that he could live without Nancy for the rest of his life, but he could live for this one day.

Why Marriage

My friend David Andersen sent me this quote, from G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday:

Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally.  It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two.  But two is not twice one;  two is two thousand times one.  That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy.

With all my heart, two is two thousand times one. And I embrace, “his root horror … isolation.”

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.

Living Alone

Sunday’s New York Times has a fascinating piece by NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg. It begins with this startling statement: “More people live alone than at any other time in history.” It notes that in Manhattan and Washington, D.C., almost half of all households have just one occupant.

In a chart comparing nations, the most solo country of all is Sweden, where 47% live alone. At the bottom are India and Pakistan, where 3% of households have just one occupant. The U.S. and Canada are in the middle of that broad range, at 27%.

Klinenberg puts a rosy spin on the trend, noting that people who live alone aren’t necessarily lonely or isolated. In fact, he says, “living alone can make it easier to be social, because single people have more free time, absent family obligations, to engage in social activities.” He notes that “compared with their married counterparts, single people are more likely to spend time with friends and neighbors, go to restaurants and attend art classes and lectures.” It’s true of older people too: “Single seniors had the same number of friends and core discussion partners as their married peers.”

We’re not necessarily becoming more solitary or isolated, then, but we are shedding obligations. When you live alone you can be as socially engaged as you wish—on your schedule and your terms.

When you share a living space, on the other hand, you have certain nagging obligations: to cleanliness, to schedule, to shared expenses… and perhaps also to shared meals and social times. Obviously marriage and family—which are equally in decline—obligate you much more deeply. Is there any doubt this is the environment where character and spirituality are formed?

It’s not a simple matter. Freedom and privacy are terrifically valuable, and our evolution from tribe to democracy is progress, I believe. Nevertheless, I feel some deep concerns over this trend. Libertarianism enthralls the right on certain issues and the left on certain other issues. (Economic liberty, gun-toting liberty, abortion liberty, sexual liberty.)There are good grounds for wanting to be left alone, especially by the government. But there are also good grounds for entering a covenant commitment, whether to people sharing your apartment, to a wife or husband or children, or even to the government formed by “we the people.”

Clearly, we’re moving in the general direction of “we the individualists.”

On Monogamy

I’m increasingly impressed by Ross Douthat’s willingness to write about important but icky issues. In yesterday’s New York Times he addresses “Why Monogamy Matters” and explains (among other things) why conservatives are unenthusiastic about funding Planned Parenthood.

Douthat tries to walk a careful line, making clear that he knows most people won’t and never have lived a perfectly chaste life up until marriage. He’s not, he says, promoting a “traditionalist utopia, where the only sex is married sex.” He’s making the point that sexual behavior should be shaped by ambitions toward love and lasting marriage. Such ambitions will lead to waiting longer, having fewer partners, and pursuing loving and lasting relationships. He cites social studies that indicate a “significant correlation between sexual restraint and emotional well-being,” particularly among women.

I mostly agree with what Douthat says, but I am not completely happy with his willingness to give away the traditionalist utopia. I understand the point he’s trying to make, but I don’t think he makes it very well.

It’s one thing to say that the world is a crooked place, and that people will inevitably fail to live up to the best for themselves. We should leaven whatever we say about sexuality with large helpings of grace and humility (qualities that Christians would have more of if they followed their Savior more rigorously).

It’s quite another to say that you don’t really expect anybody to live by sexual ideals, you just want them to be “shaped” by those ideals. That’s a lot like telling African dictators that you don’t expect them to actually live within the law, just to be shaped by it.

That’s the problem with Planned Parenthood. They say they want the best for young people, and they believe in good marriages and lasting relations. But they are so insistent that chastity is unrealistic for modern teenagers that they aren’t willing to challenge them to be better people. “Liberals argue, not unreasonably,” writes Douthat, “that Planned Parenthood’s approach is tailored to the gritty realities of teenage sexuality. But realism can blur into cynicism, and a jaded attitude can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Sex is too important to be governed by “gritty realism.” We need ambitions and ideals. All of us do, whether we are 15 or 55, rich or poor. It’s true that society as a whole will never be a “traditionalist utopia.” But plenty of individuals do in fact live wholly admirable sexual lives. It is good for them if they do so—very good—and their example has a positive influence on all of us.

Kids (and adults) get plenty of gritty realism. They could use more hope.

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.