Married Parents Really Are Happier

The new Survey of Faith and Family in America conducted for the PBS show Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly asked a national sample of Americans whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement “Married people are generally happier than unmarried people.” 30% of married parents strongly agreed, while 35% of single parents strongly disagreed. It is not surprising that married people would think married people, as a group, are better off, and unmarried people would not.

The survey itself contains a reality check, though. The respondents were also asked to rate how happy they were themselves. The analysts then compared these self-reports of happiness for the married parents and the single parents. The result:

The married were well over twice as likely to report themselves “completely happy” as the singles, 29% to 11%.

Nearly half of the marrieds (46%), but only a third of the singles (32%), called themselves “very happy.”

Nearly half the singles (44%) chose the next level down, only “fairly happy” to describe themselves.

Only one percent of the marrieds would even call themselves neither happy nor unhappy, and none of them said they were unhappy. By contrast, over ten times that many singles (11%) called themselves less than definitely happy.

While singles don’t want to believe that married people are happier, their own reports of their feelings shows that the marrieds are really happier – and know it.

Promoting Marriage is a Public Good

Over at the Family Scholars Blog, David Blankenhorn comments today on the PBS Religion and Ethics Newsweekly poll on “Faith and Family.” He writes:

“here to me is the most striking statistic — 82 percent of respondents say that government should NOT “start up programs that encourage people to get and stay married.” I’ve supported the Administration’s Healthy Marriage Initiative since the beginning, and I still do, but these numbers (and yes, I know, the wording of the question could be better) strongly suggest that, in the public mind, the basic idea is going nowhere.”

The same survey reports that most people strongly support marriage. The resistance, I think, is to the government supporting marriage. I expect there would be less resistance to other, voluntary, institutions supporting marriage.

Americans think of marriage as a good thing. However, a rising fraction of us have come to think of marriage as a private good. This is a dangerous notion. Marriage is, of course, good for private citizens. But it is also a very important public good. Society as a whole has a stake in the strength of marriages in general, and of each marriage. This means that the state does have an interest in promoting marriage.

I think that more people are adopting the view that marriage is a private good. They are not taking this view because they think any less of marriage. Rather, they are trying to avoid making a moral judgment that there is anything wrong with not valuing marriage. I don’t think the issue is about other kinds of marriage besides the traditional one. It is not the existence of alternatives to marriage which pushes people to moral privatism. It is a desire to avoid conflict with other people about the possibility of their having other judgments.

I think everyone should be willing stand up for what they think is right. Once again, we would all be greatly helped if most people were comfortable talking about the good, and the good enough. I am convinced that most people will privately choose the good, which will benefit society. Some people will have to settle for the good enough, sometimes for reasons beyond their control.

The real battleground is whether people who might get or stay married don’t do so, because people they respect have not had the nerve to say “marriage is better.”

Mainline Church Marriage: The Middle Way

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) takes a middle way on marriage, between a secular minimum and a sacramental maximum. The Presbyterian position is representative of most mainline Protestant denominations, and really of Protestant denominations in general. Catholic practice is not that far from this standard, though the Catholic theory of marriage is a little different.

“Marriage – A Theological Statement” was adopted by the church in 1980. A Q and A section makes clear that the church’s view of marriage is high in its aspirations, but reasonable in its actual requirements.

1. Should everyone be married? No. Marriage is good, but so is singleness. Jesus and Paul weren’t married.

2. Is divorce legitimate? Yes, but bad. It is a concession to sin.

3. Is intimacy outside marriage legitimate? Yes, but marriage is best. Intimacy without sex is possible and good. Sex within a merely private commitment is not really marriage.

4. What is the appropriate structure of marriage? This is the headship question. Husbands model what Christ does for church, wives model what Christians do with God. Both husbands and wives are supposed to submit to God and lead by service to others.

5. Is a wedding ceremony necessary for marriage? No, but something like it before the Christian community is.

6. Must a marriage involve the intention to have children? No. God wants humanity to be fruitful and multiply, but this does not mean that every marriage must be.

7. Is monogamy the necessary form of marriage? No, but only barely – if polygamy is the local norm and the mission church accepts that the married partners are trying to live in intimacy, fidelity, and forgiveness. But these will be “strained” by multiple spouses.

8. Must both partners be Christian? No, but we should encourage everyone to Christian commitment, and marriage is a powerful way to do that.

Sometimes Christians, especially conservative Christians, elevate the importance of marriage almost to the point of idolatry. It is important, therefore, to see how modest the actual requirements of Protestant marriage really are.

The Presbyterian marriage statement argues that God made men and women different, but created marriage so that they might unite in love and become one flesh. Yet sin infects even marriages, and sometimes they dissolve, especially due to adultery, desertion, or relations that actually harm the people in the family. This is not good, but the church works together with the divorced to encourage them to give and accept forgiveness and to maintain fidelity in their other relationships. And marriage, though a very good state, is not better than singleness, and will not be continued or repeated in the life to come.

Marriage is, for Protestants, primarily a social institution. The main rules of marriage are made by the state. Being married within the church can sanctify the marriage, calling on the aid of the Christian community and of God to help the couple. But marriage is not a sacrament.

The mainline Protestant standard for marriage is a modest, workable, and centrist approach. Knowing that may take some of the fear out of “Christian family values” for liberals and secularists.

Marriage vs. “Close Relations” Matters to the Church

Today, contemporary family law theorists are bent on hammering this new theory into law, usually using the avenue of constitutional law. What is striking is the breathless speed of these developments in the absence of any real scholarly or public debate. A particular school of thought openly aimed at re-conceptualizing marriage first took root in the academy in the 1980s. By the late 1990s it had come to dominate fashionable academic theorizing on sexual intimacy. That school of thought is successfully urging family law scholars to think in radically new ways about family law. Much of the new thinking centers on ways to transform family law from its historic role as the protector of marriage into something very close to its antagonist.

- Dan Cere, The Future of Family Law


Dan Cere, in his review of the current trends in family law, notes that in the past generation the legal discussion has changed from the traditional concern with marriage, to a wholesale substitution of the concept of “close relations.” Marriage is treated as a subset of close relations, at best. This change reflects the political movement to normalize both cohabitation and same-sex unions. Indeed, the “close relations” movement may go beyond putting other pairings on a par with marriage. The longer-term effect may be to treat marriage just as a private lifestyle choice of some individuals, rather than the basic unit of society’s foundational building block. Nor need the revolution stop there: any sort of “close relation,” involving any number, age, and configuration of people, might come to be treated as just as good as any other, as long as it is important to the participants.

The church, though, has a different standard. In the Biblical understanding, marriage is not simply the close relation of two individuals, but makes them “one flesh.” A married couple is not literally one person. But neither are they simply two separate individuals who have made a voluntary and temporary tie.

In the debate about same-sex unions that I discussed before, Maggie Gallagher pointed out that many of the tangles that Protestants get into over this issue happen because Protestants are prone to a more individualistic analysis of everything. Catholics, on the other hand, are more prone to talk about marriage as making the couple “one flesh” in the first place. Both branches of the church have a stake in how secular family law develops.

The law now treats marriage as a unique status. There is nothing else like it, not even the parent-child bond. Our law coincides with the church’s understanding because they both share an underlying – and very high – view of marriage. This is important to say – the law treats marriage as a unique, and uniquely important, relationship for good secular reasons. It is not simply a holdover from a previously religious era.

This is why we need a status of the “good enough” relationship, which is still not the same as the social ideal. Marriage is not just a close relationship like others. But saying that marriage is unique does not mean that all other close relationships are bad.

The Society Safe for Sectarianism

The genius of the American religious culture is that we have created a society in which a huge variety of religious institutions can live together, without anyone having to believe that they are all equally true.

European religion gave us established churches and dissenting sects, each of which thought it was the one true embodiment of the faith. In America, though, all these One True Churches were thrown together. None could become legally established everywhere, nor could any dominate the whole culture. Europeans invented the original terms of the sociology of religion out of their experience, especially when Ernst Troeltsch turned the Christian words “church” and “sect” into universal concepts. American sociology added another crucial term, based on our experience: denomination. In this culture, each church and each sect was obliged to become just another denomination – none of them culturally dominant, none of them the One True way of the faith. Instead, each was obliged to recognize the other as a legitimate expression of the faith, differing in the way they are named (“de-nominated”).

The idea of the denomination turned the fact of religious diversity in America into the idea and ideal of religious pluralism. Eventually the law caught up with the culture. The most important pillar of that law is in the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution. As with many products of the legislative sausage factory, the first amendment is a curious compromise. It does not say, as James Madison initially proposed, “No State shall violate the equal rights of conscience.” Instead, our first amendment says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The first part, the establishment clause, reads in this peculiar way because the individual states could and did make laws establishing religion – official, tax-supported denominations – for some time after the U.S. Constitution was ratified. The second part, the free exercise clause, actually strengthens Madison’s idea. The free exercise of religion protects actions, as well as conscientious thoughts.

We did not create a society free from religion. We created as society safe for every religious thought, and just about every religious action. We created a society safe for sectarianism.

Kevin Seamus Hasson, head of the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty, makes a similar point in his fine new book, The Right to Be Wrong. The Beckett Fund defends all kinds of religious practices from governmental restriction. They don’t do this because they are relativists, thinking all religions are equally right, but because they think American religious pluralism protects the right of every denomination -- theirs, yours, and mine – to be wrong.

Hasson, a Notre Dame-trained lawyer, argues that freedom of conscience is a natural right. He believes that it is human nature to seek the truth about why we exist and what we are supposed to do about it. And our free consciences require us to not only seek, but find, to commit to what we believe to be true. Beyond finding, we must also act on what we believe. The American right to be wrong protects our search, and our commitments, and only limits our conscientious actions in extraordinary circumstances that threaten public welfare or the free consciences of others. Our public sphere is to be governed neither by what he calls Pilgrims, who only allow their own faith, or Park Rangers, who don’t allow any.

I agree with Seamus Hasson. I think that human nature does seek to know the meaning of our existence, and that our conscience prods us to act on what we believe to be our vocation and duty. I do part company with him on one point. He allows that Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island and the cranky pioneer of religious liberty in America, argued for a God-given right to freedom of conscience, too. Hasson thinks Williams’ solution is inadequate for us today, though, because it only convinces those who believe in God. Yet I don’t see how Hasson’s argument for a human nature-given right to freedom of conscience is any different – it only convinces people who believe in natural rights. I think that Roger Williams and Seamus Hasson are both right, because I think God created the nature, both human and otherwise, from which our conscience comes.

American religious freedom rests on a conviction that allowing everyone freedom of conscience is right. This conviction cannot be proven to be true. But we have good reason to believe that it is true from our religion, our philosophy, and our experience.

Conservative Magic and Liberal Magic

There has been a fuss about posting the Ten Commandments in public schools and other public places.

A recent Kentucky case, McCreary County v. ACLU, went all the way to the Supreme Court, where the pro-posters lost. But in the same decision, about the parallel Texas case of Van Orden v. Perry, the pro-posters (or in that case, carve-in-stoners) won. The upshot was that if you want to post the Ten Commandments in a public building to make a religious statement, you lose; if, on the other hand, you post them as part of a series of legal codes, you win. SO, if you really want the Commandments in the courthouse, you can do it. Likewise, it is easy to post the Ten Commandments in public schools legally. All you have to do is teach about them. In fact, you post just about anything on the walls of schools, if you are willing to do the work of actually including the poster in the curriculum. Again, it is not hard to win, if that is what you really want to do.

I think we have had the fuss, though, because the pro-posters don’t really want to win – they want to lose so they can claim that the Christian majority is being religiously persecuted by secularists. Now, there is some truth to this. In my job I run across plenty of secularists who do want to drive all religion out of the public square. They want to do so not just despite massive public support for displaying the icons of biblical religion. They want to exclude those symbols because the majority supports them, so that the secularists, in turn, can feel persecuted by the backlash. Two can play at “oppression envy.”

But really, I don’t think that posting the Ten Commandments is about displaying the faith of the majority, or acknowledging a fundamental code of American law, or even of helping people be literate about a crucial building block of Western civilization.

Conservatives want to post the Ten Commandments as an act of magic.

I think that some people believe that if the text is physically on the wall of the courthouse or the schoolhouse, the people under its eye, so to speak, will behave better. This gesture is mostly futile. Worse, I think that treating the printed commandments this way violates the second commandment against making “graven images.”

If you want people to behave better, it would be more effective to post pictures of Mr. Rogers, or Mother Teresa, or even Barney. This would not be a great improvement, but the magical thought would be more out in the open.

I think there is a parallel kind of magical thinking for liberals. Conservatives think kids will be better behaved if we put the Ten Commandments in schools. Liberals think kids will be smarter if we put computers in schools. They expend much more effort in getting computers into schools than they do in making sure they that they work, that they have any kind of relevant software, that teachers and students know how to use them, or that the computers have anything to do with the curriculum.

The computer becomes a graven image for thinking, the way the Ten Commandments becomes a graven image for morals. Magic.

The Top Public Intellectuals are Not Moms

The hand that rocks the cradle may rule the world, but it does not lead the list of public intellectuals.

The Prospect/Foreign Policy poll of the world’s leading public thinkers was just released. As the editors note, this is a parlor game, and should not be taken too seriously. The editors listed 100 candidates they had chosen, and offered a “bonus ball” option to readers to write in others. About ten percent of the original list were women, and no women made it to the top ten on the write-in list. The top ten are men:

Noam Chomsky
Umberto Eco
Richard Dawkins
Václav Havel
Christopher Hitchens
Paul Krugman
Jürgen Habermas
Amartya Sen
Jared Diamond
Salman Rushdie

The first women comes in at #11, and begins an interesting trend: very few of them are mothers, and fewer still are married mothers. So who is #11? Naomi Klein, activist journalist and author of No Logo. She is the daughter of two well-known Canadian activists, and married to another. As far as I can tell, though, she does not have children. Her work, which is a critique of globalization, is not about family life, so it is hard to know directly what her attitude is toward marriage and children. At the least we can say that children have not been central to her work.

The other women in the top 50 are:

Camille Paglia (20), a famously single, childless, every-sexual critical feminist;
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (46), a Muslim feminist and Dutch parliamentarian who fled an arranged marriage;
Julia Kristeva (48) and Germaine Greer (49), feminist icons who do not treat motherhood as a primary female role, to say the least;

The one exception to the “subordinate motherhood” rule is Shirin Ebadi (12), the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner. Ebadi, a married Iranian lawyer and mother of two grown daughters, is a crusader for the rights of women in post-revolutionary Iran. She has been successful, in part, because she works as a wife and mother, and makes her arguments within the Muslim tradition.

The Prospect poll was of public intellectuals. I imagine that if we could have such a thing as the list of top “domestic intellectuals,” the list would be much richer in married mothers.

"Marry Your Baby Daddy" Day

In September, novelist Maryann Reid and Rev. Herbert Daughtry made the dream of marriage a reality for 10 lucky couples. Hundreds of couples who already had children together and who hoped to marry “someday” responded to a contest. The prize: ten all-expenses-paid weddings, presided over by Rev. Daughtry. This contest was aimed at African-American couples, and most of the couples and wedding-makers were black. The idea, though, is a good one for the whole nation to ponder and pursue.

The single most urgent family problem is to get single moms to marry their baby daddies.
(That’s what I think today, anyway. I am still puzzling on this.)

In the long run we need to create a culture which authoritatively supports marriage and careful childrearing. In the short run, though, we already have couples who have children and plan to marry someday, in the pie-in-the-sky future.

Communities could make this dream of marriage a reality. All they need is the wedding.

Suppose every congregation in town agreed to take part in a “Marry Your Baby Daddy Day” – or “Parents’ Wedding Day,” or “Mommy and Daddy Get Married Day,” or whatever name works best. Each minister would agree to perform the wedding, and members of the congregation would find a way to get the dress, the cake, the rings, the flowers, the pictures, the reception, and so forth, and do it nicely. As with the original Marry Your Baby Daddy Day, there could be a contest – which would itself get many couples to get down to cases about getting married, even if they didn’t win the contest. On that happy day, the front-page news would be that the whole community had worked together to make marriage dreams come true for the couples and, especially, for their children.

Promoting marriage among parents would, I am convinced, pay for itself in happier and healthier grownups, and better cared for kids. Men, who would probably resist the idea the most at first, would benefit the most in the end. Yes, we should build in a marriage preparation course, even for cohabiting couples with kids. Yes, we should screen out likely wife-beaters, and get them some other kind of help. Yes, we would probably need to reach beyond each congregation to find the money. But it would be worth it.

The spin-off benefit of a community Marry Your Baby Daddy Day would be to make clear how much the community as a whole supported marriage for all children’s parents – not just those who think they can afford a wedding.

Amending the Definition of Marriage

In an earlier blog I wrote about Kentucky’s mysterious definition of marriage, which reads:

402.005 Definition of marriage.
As used and recognized in the law of the Commonwealth, "marriage" refers only to the civil status, condition, or relation of one (1) man and one (1) woman united in law for life, for the discharge to each other and the community of the duties legally incumbent upon those whose association is founded on the distinction of sex.

All of this I find clear and sensible, until the last clause: “legally incumbent upon those who association is founded on the distinction of sex.” In a reply to the earlier blog, Nancy Jo Kemper, the executive director of the Kentucky Council of Churches, suggested that this phrase was a delicate 19th century way of saying that the husband was responsible for the wife’s debts, and that the wife could not deny the husband sex. This may be so.

In any case, I propose to amend this definition to make it clearer and, perhaps, more up to date. I propose to strike the puzzling final clause, and rewrite the definition this way:

402.005 Definition of marriage.
As used and recognized in the law of the Commonwealth, "marriage" refers only to the civil status, condition, or relation of one (1) man and one (1) woman united in law for life, for the discharge to each other and the community of the duties of mutual material support, sexual fidelity, and the raising of the children they may produce.

I see three advantages in revising the definition of marriage this way.

First, it makes clear that the duties of marriage are mutual and equally incumbent on husband and wife.

Second, it names three particular duties of marriage which are of greatest benefit to society as a whole. Husbands and wives who support one another materially are much more likely to make a net contribution to the wealth of society, and not be a drain on the surplus produced by others. Couples who are sexually faithful to one another avoid a world of trouble for themselves; moreover, if all sex took place only within faithful marriage, the domestic violence rate would go way down, the murder rate would go way down, and sexually transmitted diseases would disappear from the earth. Parents who raise their own children produce the greatest benefit to society, and to their children – and the more carefully they raise their children, the greater the benefit to everyone.

The third reason to amend the definition of marriage this way is to use the bully pulpit of the state to say clearly what marriage is for as far as the government is concerned. Marriage has become a politicized issue today in large part because we have lost a clear conception of what marriage is for.

Before governmental family policy can help support and shape family life, the state needs to have and promote a clearer idea of what it thinks marriage is for. The process of amending the definition would allow us to have a richer discussion of what marriage is for. Improving the state’s definition of marriage would give substantive guidance to the government and to married people about how the state and the married should relate to one another.

The Heart of Blueness

Our travels on my daughter’s college trip have taken us far from Kentucky, to some of the iconic places of “Blue America” – Swarthmore, PA, Princeton, NJ, Middletown, CT, Williamstown, MA, and, especially, Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was asked by an academic friend in Cambridge, as an emissary from Red America, if I could explain why most Americans voted in a way that seems to Cambridge folk to be just plain irrational.

I think I do understand the difference between the two views of the world – and they begin with a difference over what counts as rational. Cambridge extracts a kind of intelligence from all over the world and concentrates it in one place and in a narrow set of careers. Danville, Kentucky, and the thousands of other Danvilles in the great Flyover Country of America, draws people with a different kind of practical wisdom (as well as the usual kind of brains) and spread them over a broader range of The Good Life. The wisdom of Cambridge is that if individuals get their work done, any kind of family life they choose to make is good enough. The wisdom of Danville is that if most people marry and raise their children with care, many kinds of work life that they might choose are good enough.

I heard Thomas Frank, the author of What’s the Matter With Kansas? speak at a panel of the American Sociological Association this summer. The gist of his book is that Kansas and places like it vote for Republicans and against their economic interests because they believe that the Democratic leaders are an arrogant elite who look down on ordinary, faithful, family-first Americans. Frank's presentation, and the others like it from the panel, drew an approving, “ain’t it awful” response from the gray heads in the audience. Then a young woman rose to ask a question. She said that as a Midwestern liberal she had read Frank's book and joined in lamenting the paranoia of her neighbors. Then she went to Cambridge as a graduate student and discovered that it was all true. Her professors and their peers did routinely denigrate the intelligence of religious people and disparage the morals of those who value marriage and careful childrearing. The panel could offer no reply.

What does this have to do with family life? The great meritocratic experiment of picking who we will educate from the top IQ scores, and then picking who will manage our economy and design our social policies from the top of this intellectual heap, has a serious sociological flaw. The “cognitive elite,” as Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein called them, are chosen as individuals, educated as individuals, put through the elite job selection sieve as individuals. Is it any wonder, then, that they are likely to put individual achievement ahead of forming rich and stable families? In particular, it is, it seems to me, a deep flaw in our current meritocratic culture that the highest achieving women are more likely to skip marriage and children the higher they go in the power structure.

There is much that is great and amazing about our meritocratic system. It is certainly better than any system in which rulers are chosen simply because their ancestors were rulers. But the weakness of Blue America is that it creams individuals with only one kind of intelligence, while leaving out other, family-oriented kinds of wisdom. Worse, the highly individualistic way in which we construct our meritocracy makes it less likely that they will have families to pass their intelligence and achievements and work ethic on to. This is a double loss for American families and American society.

Why Men Earn More

Warren Farrell’s Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap – and What Women Can Do About It is ingeniously packaged as a self-help book for women. Farrell’s main finding is that women make less than men because women trade work that pays less for lives that are more balanced, have more time for children, and last longer. Men – most especially married fathers -- work longer, harder, and in more difficult jobs even though that means they see less of their children and die younger. In fact, Farrell argues, when we really compare apples and apples, women earn at least the same as men, and probably more.

The pay gap could, in principle, disappear if tens of millions of women were willing to take rough jobs which required sacrificing their families. Since this is unlikely to happen short of a draconian command economy, the gap will remain. This gap in group earnings is not a bad thing if individual men and women are free to make other arrangements that serve their families as well.

Farrell offers 25 things that women could do to earn more money. For example, women could chose fields in the hard sciences as much as they did in the arts. Less educated women could earn more if they were as willing to work “in the heat and the sleet” as they are “indoors and neat.” Many women, of course, can and do choose such jobs. But it defies what we know about women and men in general to think that hundreds of millions of working men and women in this country would be equally likely to choose the same way.

The main point underlying all of the differences in work choices that Farrell cites is that parents arrange their lives to serve their kids. Women tend to arrange their work so they can be with their children more. Men tend to arrange their work so they can provide for their children (and wives) more. We know this because childless men and women tend to be nearly equal in their work, midway between the averages for mothers and fathers.

Ultimately, men as a group earn more because married fathers are more productive at work than any other group. Men earn more despite the fact that single, childless men earn less than most women.

Promiscuity is Not Androgynous

I want to start with a private exchange that I had with Annie at Ambivablog (see the link at left). She wrote:

Basically I think women are less-than-half empowered sexually and emotionally, which is a dangerous place to be. They're pretending to be tough and enjoy sex for its own sake "like men" … but it's very brittle and fragile: they are really trying to buy love with it, which is a losing proposition. I think a lot of abortions are casualties in this desperate game. Girls and women need to hold themselves in much higher regard; the sensible "no" can only follow from that naturally.

I agree with this entirely. Men and women as a group are not the same now in their desire for uncommitted sex. Some people hope that that is merely a socially constructed difference, and someday free women will be just as promiscuous and conscience-free as men are – though why anyone would think such a state of affairs would make for a better society is beyond me. Myself, I want to see men – even single young men – be caring and responsible about sex.

In any case, I think we have strong sociobiological reasons to think that men and women are quite different in their attitudes toward uncommitted sex. They always have been different, and they always will be.

Usually at this point I need to make the Sociological Concession: what I have just said is true of the group, though some individuals within each group do deviate from the norm. However, fascinating research by Syracuse University anthropologist John Townsend, reported in Steven Rhoads’ Taking Sex Differences Seriously, suggests that even women who are trying to be promiscuous without conscience “just like a man,” find it almost impossible to do. He interviewed a group of women students, both undergraduates and medical students, who were unusually pro-sex. They had lots of sex, with lots of men. They believed in their heads that sex was just a fun physical pleasure from which they should not require or expect emotional commitment. And yet, their hearts would not cooperate. They found that they couldn’t just do it like a man and think nothing of him in the morning. They tried to talk themselves out of having feelings for the men they had sex with, and especially from hoping that he had feelings for them. They were using sex to get love, as the proverb said, despite their strong commitment to an androgynous ideology. They thought they were “pro-sex” (a strange term for the belief that sex doesn’t mean anything), but were still really “pro-love.” And a good thing, too, I say.

The nymphomaniac woman is a male fantasy. Even the happy slut seems to be a male fantasy. I think that connecting sex with love is a deep and hopeful instinct. Rather than trying to stomp it out with an ideology of androgynous promiscuity, we would do better to try to curb male promiscuity by showing how much it hurts women, and children, and, ultimately, men themselves.

Evolution and Creation: A Centrist Proposal

The latest flap over Intelligent Design is another wrinkle in the old struggle of Creation and Evolution, which is itself but a wrinkle in the older struggle of Religion and Science, or (even worse), Faith and Reason.

I think the whole fight is a fraud. There is no conflict between faith and reason, or religion and science, or creation and evolution. Intelligent design is one possibility of the larger metaphysic of how the universe works, which is equally compatible with creation or evolution theories.

Evolution is a theory. The part of the theory which explores how living forms develop over time by adapting to their environments is well supported by the empirical record. The theory of evolution is a scientific theory. As such, it can always be tested, but can never be proven. Scientific theories are in principle always falsifiable by new empirical evidence, and can be displaced by a more comprehensive theory.

Darwin thought that one part of the mechanism of the development of new forms was random mutation. This part of evolutionary theory is much less well established than development through environmental adaptation. Mutations happen, and new forms do appear, but random mutation does not appear to happen on the scale necessary to produce all the evolution that we appear to see. The idea that new forms appear at random, and that their appearance is not part of a design, is not a scientific idea, because it cannot be falsified. It is one theory, but only one. Random mutation is essentially a theological theory.

Natural science starts with a choice of method to only make theories about what can be observed in the material world, preferably from material processes which are or can be repeated. As a methodological convention, materialism has proven a very powerful tool. It means, though, that science simply cannot say anything, one way or the other, about whether material phenomena are the only kind which exist. Science can neither prove nor disprove the claim that materialism is the true metaphysic. Some people think that the universe is only material. That is not a scientific idea, either. Materialism is essentially a theological theory, too.

I have done surveys of Presbyterian ministers, who are among the most educated and reason-oriented of Christians. If you give them a forced choice between Creation and Evolution, naturally most of them will have to choose Creation, or deny God and the Bible. If, though, you give them a middle option – God created the world and has guided evolution – most Presbyterian ministers will choose this option.

We can and should have a debate about how to understand this middle position – theistic evolution, or adaptive creation, or what have you. But we should be clear that there are many middle positions in the creation/evolution discussion.

So why do we keep having this polarized debate? Because ideologues on both sides see the world as polarized, and they have more power in the world if other people can be made to see it as polarized, too.

Refuse the false dichotomy. Choose faith and reason, God and science, creation and evolution.

A word about today's post

Today's post, "Where the Action is in Family Policy," is longer than usual. This is mostly because I was covering more terrain than usual.

The other reason is that I am going on the road for a week, taking my daughter on the big college exploration trip. I will post from the road as I am able, but I may miss a few days. So I wanted you to have something meaty to chew on.

Enjoy, and write back ...

Where the Action is in Family Policy

My wife and I used to work for the U.S. Department of Education. When I got the providential chance to move to Kentucky, she was able to get in on the ground floor of Kentucky’s nation-leading education reform program. Some of our Washington friends thought she was making a professional sacrifice in moving to the provinces. But as she wisely said at the time, “in education, the states are where the action is.” Washington is not the place to be to make a difference in elementary and secondary schooling in this country. She is in the right place to make a difference (proud husband plugs the Kentucky Association of School Councils).

So where do you go for the “action” to make a difference in family life?

Families are the most decentralized of institutions. Every institution affects, and is affected by, family life, but none has the decisive leverage on them. Families exist prior to all other institutions, and are, at root, independent of them.

But back to the “action.” The government can affect families. I think the government has a greater capacity to create social problems than to solve them, but it can help in the most difficult and expensive cases. In any case, it is inevitable that the government be involved in family life, if only in defining the terms of the hundred ways families interact with the property-regulating system. But in the normal life of normal families, the government is not very relevant.

Work affects families in a thousand ways. Most of us work, in part, to support our families. Work policies about childcare, health benefits, and retirement are key family policy battlegrounds. Our jobs are the biggest competitors with our families for our time. But business does not have a full “family policy,” nor should it. Business only has policy for those areas where it can’t avoid affecting families, but businesses generally, and rightly, try to avoid entanglement with families as much as possible.

Schools could have a big role in shaping families. They interact with families daily. They shape the schedules of children, and thus of parents. “Family life education” is something that family policy debaters from across the political spectrum want schools to do more of. My family life class feeds a real hunger, especially among students who are close to marriage. Yet schools, especially public schools, have shied away from all but the most clinical aspects of family life education, precisely because “family values” politics has made the moral aspects of family life too controversial for risk-averse schools.

Religious institutions have a deep stake in how well families are working, and are constitutionally suited to promoting the moral aspects of family life. Conservative religious institutions increasingly define themselves by their pro-family positions, to the point of risking cultural captivity and displacing their primary God-oriented message. This is the lesson that some of the founders of the Moral Majority drew from the absorption of their religious crusade into secular party machinery. And on the other side, mainline churches, ironically, take their cues on family life from secular social science and ideological egalitarianism as much as they do from Scripture and their religious traditions.

So what does that leave?

First and foremost, the action in family policy is in families. Most people learn most of what they know about how to make families – how to be married, raise kids, take care of parents, and relate as a family to the world – from other families. They learn from the families they were raised in, and from more-experienced peers. There are family-based family policy organizations – Marriage Savers comes to mind – which are willing to do the hard, retail work of connecting one family with another. Families will always be the most important arena for effective family policy.

But the second-most-important arena for family policy is the one you and I are in now. The soft institutions that shape the culture – the “media,” broadly construed – are important in shaping how people understand family life. I don’t think that cultural institutions make families, but they do affect how we know what we are making. An anthropological proverb that I have always found useful is, “ritual precedes doctrine.” That is, we learn to do social practices by doing them, before we learn or understand why we do them. We make families from instinct and desire and habit, and then from well-understood reasons. But the complementary proverb should be (I am making this up), “ritual without doctrine becomes taboo.” Things we do without knowing why are defenseless; they are vulnerable to cultural change, willy-nilly.

I believe that we are at a crucial moment in our society’s understanding of family life. The normal practices – marrying, raising kids, sticking together, caring for our elders – are still the accepted ritual for most Americans. But the reasons that we do these things are being criticized. Most institutions are far out of practice in explaining what is a good family, and what is a good-enough family. I don’t think we are in a culture war between just two opposing armies. But I do think we are in a cultural competition, in which right and left vie for the hearts and minds of the middle about why we have families.

The action in family policy is in how the center responds to the competing ideas lobbed at us from the wings. This, it seems to me, is a good reason for the center to blog back.

Marital Longevity Awards

I am working on family policy ideas that are Outside the Box. This week’s bright idea: graduated tax rebates as rewards for marital longevity.

Marriage is one of the most pro-social institutions. As an institution, it is good for women, very good for men, and the best thing for children. (If you think Jesse Bernard demonstrated that marriage is good for men but bad for women, see Waite and Gallagher’s refutation in The Case for Marriage. If you have never heard of Jesse Bernard, Go Gen X!)

The great benefit of marriage is not primarily economic, nor is it primarily a benefit to the state. However, the state does have strong reasons to support marriage. Among those benefits are economic ones – married people pay more in to the state than they cost, and their kids are much more likely to build up society than to burden it.

So here is my proposal: a state income tax rebate of ten dollars for each year that you have been in your current marriage. Widows and widowers would continue to receive the rebate at the level they achieved when their spouse died. Thus, if you and your spouse have been married ten years, you would get $100 back; at your silver anniversary the state hands back $250; golden anniversaries are awarded $500 back.
And I would make a big deal of it, too. Call them Marital Longevity Awards. Brag about how big a grateful payback the state made to these helpful citizens. Have bureaucrats whose job it is to increase the payout each year. Put the milestone awards in the paper (with the couple’s permission, of course). That is the carrot.

The stick is that only current marriages count. If you get divorced, you go back to zero; if you remarry, you start over again. Cohabiters, even with children, get zip.

At ten bucks per year, this rebate is not a budget breaker. And states reduce their other costs when more people marry and marriages last longer. Even if this investment in marriage cost ten percent of a state’s income tax revenue at first, it could pay that back by increasing the total ‘marriedness” of the state, which produces benefits that ripple through society.

Bright Ideas need a good critical response, so have at it.

[Where did I get the ten percent figure? For example, the average Kentuckian pays about $655 in state income tax, so a couple would pay about $1,300. I don’t know how much married couples pay, but married people generally have higher incomes. Conservatively, let’s say an average married couple in Kentucky, a pretty average state in this regard, pays $1,500 in state income taxes. Being only a little optimistic, we can expect about 3/4ths of them to make it to their tenth anniversary, and 2/3rds to their 20th. At any given moment, most of the marriages that will eventually go the distance are still in their early years, so the state would not be giving a big rebate to each couple. Making an educated guess, let’s say the average payout would be $150 per couple. That is about ten percent of the state’s income tax revenue (though only about 2% of the total state and local revenue from all taxes).]

Kentucky’s Mysterious Definition of Marriage

In order to Make a Difference in the commonwealth in which I happily reside, I have been reading through the Kentucky Revised Statutes on family law. (My sister wrote, “I don’t know what you’re doing penance for, but it must have been pret-ty bad.") No, really, statutes are fascinating. As witnessed by the first item on my quest, the definition of marriage:

402.005 Definition of marriage.
As used and recognized in the law of the Commonwealth, "marriage" refers only to the civil status, condition, or relation of one (1) man and one (1) woman united in law for life, for the discharge to each other and the community of the duties legally incumbent upon those whose association is founded on the distinction of sex.

I understand most of this. As far as the government is concerned, marriage is a civil status. Other institutions, such as churches, can make of marriage something more if they want to. Marriage unites one (1) and one (1) to distinguish our monogamy from the polygamy that one might find elsewhere. Kentucky marriage unites a man and a woman, re-affirming, as the 2004 constitution amendment vote made clear, this state’s commitment to traditional heterosexual marriage. Marriage is for life, as least in hope. Marriage is both for the couple and for the whole community -- and a great boon it is to both, too.

Then we get to the mysterious part. What on earth does “duties legally incumbent upon those whose association is founded on the distinction of sex” mean?

What I would expect at this point in the sentence is, “sexual fidelity and the raising of the children they produce,” or something to that effect. I believe that is what “those whose association is founded on the distinction of sex” means. My best guess is that the General Assembly intended something like sexual fidelity and childrearing. They didn’t want to say that, though, so as not to exclude the childless, adoptive parents, and, perhaps, the maritally celibate. So it went through the legislative sausage grinder and came out with this choice legal euphemism, “duties legally incumbent upon those whose association is founded on the distinction of sex.”

If anyone knows the history of this phrase, I would welcome illumination.

Centrist Policy Means Distinguishing the Good, the Bad, and the Tolerated

As I argued in “What I Think Principled Centrism Means,” a centrist wants to promote what is best for society, tolerate what is good enough, and prevent what is harmful. This means that to define a centrist policy about anything, we need a category of social practice between the preferred and the prohibited. The natural thing to call this category is “tolerated.”

For example, historically and cross-culturally, marriage is the preferred institution in which to raise children, and incestuous unions are a prohibited way. What centrists need to be able to say is that marriage is preferred for raising children, and some other ways – my nominees would be single parenthood and same-sex unions -- are tolerated, acceptable, good enough. This is true of any social policy. The best way is still better, and social policy should provide incentives to promote the best way. But those who fall in the middle category, the good enough way, should not be penalized beyond the natural inefficiencies of doing something in a less than optimal way.

For liberal egalitarians having any kind of second class status is unacceptable.
For conservative perfectionists permitting any but the preferred way is to connive at social breakdown.

The primary political and philosophical problem of centrism is legitimizing the distinctions among the good, the bad, and the good enough.

Male Headship Isn’t as Bad as It’s Cracked Up to Be – Or as Good (Part Two)

Yesterday I talked about Maggie Gallagher’s subtle argument in Does Christianity Teach Male Headship? a position I agree with almost completely. There is one part of Gallagher’s argument, though, that I think is contestable. She imagines a “male headship” husband saying, “I make all the big decisions and she makes the little ones. Funny how in forty-five years, no big decisions have come up yet.”

Someday I want to do the big study of how husbands and wives really make decisions. I have, though, some evidence and some little studies already. What they suggest to me is that in most marriages, regardless of ideology, the couple has a good working agreement on nearly all decisions, but in the normal course of things, he really does make the big decisions and she makes all the little ones. As my mother reminded me, my father used to say, “I am not involved in any decision that costs less than $10,000.”

A study by my students Lolita Short and Buffy Huffman (Dennis) compared two conservative Protestant congregations, one black and one white. In both Bible-believing churches, men and women thought male headship was commanded by Scripture and matched their personal experience. When we got down to the details of how decisions were made in their marriages, though, both husbands and wives agreed that she decided nearly all aspects of daily life. “Headship” only came up in the big decisions.

Other evidence, though, suggests that even on big matters, such when to have children, where to live, or whether to change jobs, if the wife disagreed with the husband’s inclination, she was usually effective in delaying and modifying the decision to something more to her liking. Christel Manning’s fascinating study, God Gave us the Right: Conservative Catholic, Evangelical Protestant, and Orthodox Jewish Women Grapple with Feminism, described the kind of negotiations that even very conservative Protestant women made with their husband’s theoretical headship. She cites one evangelical wife as saying that she always followed her husband’s decisions, but when they disagreed, that meant that they had not prayed enough to discern God’s will.

Male headship is a more subtle matter than it first appears to be -- both less scary to egalitarians and less authoritative for hierarchical views of marriage.

Male Headship Isn’t as Bad as It’s Cracked Up to Be – Or as Good (Part One)

In Does Christianity Teach Male Headship? editors David Blankenhorn, Don Browning, and Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen assemble a fine intra-Christian debate. They are sounding out a middle position on how Christian marriage can do justice to the biblical standards without oppressing women.

On the one side are the editors and their allies. They say “no” to the title question, and instead make a case for “equal-regard” marriage. They read such tough passages as Ephesians 5:22, “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord,” as applying both ways. Wives should submit to husbands, they argue, and husbands should submit to wives. They do not see marriage as simply a contract of two individuals, but instead as requiring mutual transformation on both sides.

On the other side are a variety of critics, Protestant and Catholic, some quite conservative, some in the center. Their consensus, as I read it, is that the Bible does teach, and assume, some kind of male headship. Several of the critics see male headship as a way to address the “male problematic” of incorporating men into the mother-child families they help create. None of the critics, not even the most conservative, thinks headship means that husbands should make all the decisions and have all the power. All of the authors in the book firmly reject the idea that male headship in any way allows husbands to abuse wives. The critics convince me, though, that some kind of “soft patriarchy” is the net result of Biblical teaching.

The richest criticism comes from Maggie Gallagher. She first points out a difference in the Protestant and Catholic approaches to the whole idea of marriage and headship. Conservative Protestants affirm male headship and liberal Protestants contest it. Catholics, on the other hand, are more drawn to the indissolubility of marriage. If husband and wife are really “one flesh,” headship doesn’t really mean “domination” as it might in a hierarchical organization of separated individuals. It makes no more sense to think of the head oppressing the heart than the reverse. Moreover, Gallagher notes, the head of the household doesn’t have quite the life-and-death power over the family’s economic survival today as in biblical times. Headship ain’t what it used to be.

Gallagher’s best argument, I think, is that male headship is a “largely honorific title.”“Male headship offers men an excuse to submit to the demands of family life – and to the reality that wives retain considerable power, control, and authority in the home over the daily life of the husband.” The offer of male headship, coupled with the reality of both parents sacrificing for their families, is part of the cunning of civilization to turn us all into decent members of the human community.

If You Are Not Outraged, Perhaps You Are Paying Attention to the Bigger Picture.

I am gruntled from faith, hope, and life.

I have the best life in the world. Best wife, best kids, good health, great job, friendly neighbors, smart colleagues, nice town, and a chance to make things better for other people. A great life helps one have a cheery outlook on life. Indeed, I think it would be ungrateful to feel otherwise. One of the requirements for sainthood in Catholic law is cheerfulness. Not optimism, and certainly not a naïve belief that everything is already perfect. But I have experienced that a cheerful approach to life is a help to me and to others.

But a great life is no guarantee of contentment, or even of being pleasant. I know people who are in what seem to me to be a great situation who nonetheless are disgruntled, and fuss about it often. In fact, they are prone to put a sticker on their car which says, “If You Are Not Outraged, You Are Not Paying Attention.” This seems to me to be a dangerous disposition. There is always a market for ideologies that justify breaking things, and the idea that outrage is the expression of righteous indignation is powerful fuel for destruction. The Bolsheviks thought that the best way to make things better was to make them worse – and hope that they emerged victorious from the rubble. Anger is a deadly sin. The Seven Deadly Sins were not so named because they are in themselves the worst sins, but because when they become habits, they produce so many other sins.

I have an informed hope that many things in life are getting better. The world, the country, my town, my family, are all richer, freer, healthier, and with a more open future than ever. Of course there are still bad things in the world. But more people have more capacity to make them better than ever before. One of the reasons that so many people have the option (indeed, the luxury) of being outraged is that many more problems can be ameliorated or even solved than ever before. Conditions in the world that can’t be changed are not “social problems,” they are facts of life. Sun spots are not a social problem; skin cancer is. Two hundred years ago polio was a bad thing that just happened, like a tree branch falling on your head; now it is a worldwide social problem that is nearly solved. Yes, there are very scary possibilities for the future. I myself am worried about the potential clash of civilizations. Yet this very danger also brings hope of an outcome – because civilization itself is a huge and hopeful achievement.

I have faith that Providence ultimately guides all creation. Of course, people use their God-given freedom to create problems all the time. I don’t know why bad things happen to good people. I also don’t know why good things happen to so-so people, like me. As my wife and I say to one another often, “it’s not fair.” We are grateful for our great kids, whom we did not create. Undeserved good fortune is as mysterious as undeserved bad fortune, and both are an argument for Providence – or nihilism and despair.

As for me and my house, we will have faith in Providence.

What I think Principled Centrism Means

I was talking to my mother this morning, as I do every Saturday. We were having a friendly argument about the causes and solutions of social problems, as we do every Saturday. I was not satisfied with the solutions proposed by some leaders of our party, but definitely disagreed with the opposite solutions. Mom wanted to know what was in between. This led me to a helpful, spontaneous clarification.

Let me put this in a too-strong way at first in order to be clear:

A centrist wants to promote what is best for society, tolerate what is good enough, and prevent what is harmful.

Conservatives want to promote what is best for society, and prevent everything else.

Liberals want to promote all options (except the truly dangerous ones) as equally good.

If your first reaction to this is, “Who is to say what is best?” you are a probably a liberal.

If your first reaction to this is, “Why settle for mediocrity?” you are probably a conservative.

If this bell-curve picture of the social options seems reasonable to you, and you have no principled objection to making discriminating judgments – welcome to the Gruntled Center.

(Feeling centrist, but not gruntled? I will take that up tomorrow).

Diversity Means Same-Sex Marriage is Not Inevitable Everywhere

Maggie Gallagher, in the her article on gay marriage that I wrote about a few days ago, says that the most powerful argument advanced by the proponents of same-sex marriage is simply that it is inevitable. Canada recently became the fourth nation (after the Netherlands, Belgium, and Spain) to legalize same-sex unions. Several states and cities have been doing the same. In the “blue” cities of America, this may seem to be an inevitable trend. My wife and I used to live in Dupont Circle in Washington, DC, one of the great gay and liberal centers in America. If we had only read the local press there, and only talked to our neighbors and people like them, the complete normalization of homosexual practice would have seemed the only rational outcome for the wheel of history. As a college professor I live in a blue enclave which believes the same thing.

However, I am a college professor in Kentucky. I live in a small blue enclave within a very red state. Which brings me to the point. Kentucky passed an amendment to our state constitution in 2004 which specified that marriage meant only the union of a man and a woman. It passed by a huge majority. And similar laws passed in seven other states then, in nearly all of them by large margins. Kentucky is not Washington, DC, and it sure isn’t Dupont Circle.

Let’s consider a parallel case to see where the same-sex marriage issue might go. The debate about gay marriage is recent as a national issue. The debate about gay ordination, however, has been wracking the mainline churches for a generation. The Presbyterian Church (USA), a pillar of the mainline and one of the most liberal denominations in the country, was first obliged to face the issue and make a decision in the 1970s. The liberal leadership of the church, coming off triumphs in fights to make the races equal and then the sexes equal in the church, expected a routine triumph. Instead, the church articulated a “definitive guidance” that, while people with homosexual orientation were welcome in the church, homosexual practice was a sin according to the Bible. Members who disagreed with this position were welcome to stay and argue the point, but they could not be ministers and elders of the church. This conclusion has been tested many times since then. To the surprise of many, the center has held. Despite bitter annual fights on the subject, the church has not changed its position because most members, elders, and ministers agree with it.

What does this have to do with same-sex marriage in America? In this great land of ours, we find all kinds of individuals, and all kinds of communities which vary across a wide spectrum of opinion. Vermont may pass a popular law allowing same-sex marriage. Kentucky will not, not anytime soon. This is what democracy yields. If you are actually in favor of diversity, it seems to me that you not only have to accept the diversity of the results of democratic decision-making, you should celebrate it.

The debate about same-sex marriage is not over. It has barely begun. The attempts to short-circuit the debate by judicial imposition is, as I have written, the wrong way to make a social revolution. As we enjoy the long, slow, sometimes ugly process of democratic debate and legislation, we should not expect that every jurisdiction will end up with the same result. And this is, from my centrist perspective, a good thing.

Learning to be Individuals: Self-Assertion for the Top Classes, Sucking It Up for the Bottom

An interesting new book, Adrie Kusserow’s, American Individualisms: Child Rearing and Social Class in Three Neighborhoods, looks at the ways in which parents and preschools teach the kids of different classes to be “individuals.” She compares children in the upper-middle-class enclave of Manhattan’s Upper East Side with two Queens neighborhoods, one petty bourgeois and one working class. Families in both boroughs want their kids to be individuals, in the good old American way. But how they realize that individuality, and why, differs dramatically by class.

The kids from the bottom classes are taught what Kusserow calls “hard individualism” designed to toughen them up. Parents want their kids to be independent and self-sufficient – within a social hierarchy. Good kids obey their superiors, and show initiative and independence within their assigned role. Within the preschool world, kids compete to climb the ladder to status.

Kids from the top classes learn “soft individualism” in which they express the feelings and creativity that come from their unique selves. Good kids show independence and initiative against any constraints on their imagination. Parents and teachers try hard not be exercise power over the children. Within the preschool world, all are equal and everyone is your friend.

Rich parents want kids to be flexible to take advantage of life’s opportunities;
Poor parents want kids to be flexible to bend with life’s limitations.

The irony of this education is that the curriculum of hard, competitive individualism aims to produce people who will fit in to a fixed structure, and rise within it by following the rules. The curriculum of the soft, egalitarian individualism, on the other hand, is the training for the “masters of the universe” who will sit on the top of the social structure and set the rules that others abide by.

Why Baptists Can Adapt to Same-Sex Marriage Laws Better Than Presbyterians Can

Nearly all Christian denominations, both evangelical and mainline, read the Bible as opposing homosexual practice. As a result, they do not perform same-sex marriages. Most denominations, though, have a separate debate about whether same-sex marriages should be allowed by the government. Here, the two groups differ. Evangelical denominations, such as the Southern Baptist Convention, oppose legalizing same-sex marriages, whereas several mainline denominations, such as the Presbyterian Church (USA), support legal same-sex marriage or civil unions. This is not a hypocritical position: the church is a voluntary association whose members have chosen to live under Biblical rules, while the state is an involuntary association whose citizens must abide by the secular laws. The church can set itself a higher standard than the state can demand.

In the United States there is no established church, and therefore no dissenting sects in the classic European sense. All religious institutions are equally denominations, on a level playing field. Yet each denomination has a distinctive understanding of its role in relation to the larger culture. Some denominations are more churchly, some more sectarian, and which attitude toward the state and the culture it has usually reflects its pre-American heritage.

Baptist churches were born in Europe and New England as dissenting sects. In the South, the Southern Baptist Church is culturally dominant and in many counties is numerically a majority. Yet the Baptist churches tend to approach the state and the culture as a sect. A sect does not expect the World, and especially the government, to be godly – usually quite the opposite. The Southern Baptist Convention often has a strong message and rule for Baptists, and usually the same strong message for the state and for society at large. But if the state adopts a rule that the church does not accept, a sect always has the option of dissenting from the state and creating a separate counter-cultural enclave.

The Presbyterian Church, heirs of the established Church of Scotland and the culturally hegemonic Calvinist church of Geneva, tends to see itself as one of the stewards of society. The Presbyterian Church accepts the principle of the separation of church and state. Yet Presbyterians have been instrumental in developing many of the institutions of American society, especially the educational institutions. They did so not with the idea of Presbyterianizing everyone, but as a way of being good stewards of the gifts given to Presbyterians to use for the benefit of all. Mainline churches in general, and the Presbyterian Church in particular, are used to having their views, the laws, and the norms of society all correspond. While the mainline has not be identical with the Establishment for more than a generation, it is still disorienting to a churchy denomination to have its norms run counter to the laws.

Maggie Gallagher, in an excellent analysis of the arguments about same-sex marriage, notes that “If same-sex marriage is a right, … the capacity of schools and faith communities to transmit the marriage idea to the next generation will be sharply curtailed. People who believe that children need mothers and fathers will be treated like bigots in the public square.”

Baptists who oppose making same-sex marriage legal would nonetheless know what do to if and when it does become the law: they maintain their own counter-worldly rules within the church, and work to elect individuals who will change the law back. If that means that they are in tension with the world in the meantime, that is only to be expected; Baptists have been there many times before. Ironically it is the Presbyterians, who support civil unions and even a form of legal same-sex marriage, who are ambivalent and uncertain when they get their way in the law, but society treats them as bigots and hypocrites for having a different rule in the church. Stewards of society are not ideologically prepared to be in such high tension with the World.

Magical Motherhood for the Upper Middle Class

Poor teen mothers in the slums choose to have their babies now, and hope that someday they will marry – and while they are at it, have a good job, a house with a picket fence, and a personal unicorn. See these earlier blogs for the details. William Galston rightly calls this “magical thinking.” It is of a piece with other poor teens telling researchers that they plan to be doctors and lawyers – while flunking out of high school. Galston’s solution would be to provide some kind of middle class mentors to give the kind of guidance and reality check that middle class kids get at home.

I teach middle class kids. They have a realistic understanding of the connection between school and careers, which they pursue diligently and well. They have a clear understanding of the value of marrying before having kids, and definite plans to do so, someday.

Some of the women I teach, though, show a different kind of magical thinking. They believe that they can finish college, then get professional training, get their careers well launched, start to look for a husband, get married, get their two careers coordinated, and then start to have children – all before their eggs get too old. This is the problem that Sylvia Ann Hewlett described so well in Creating a Life. The very high achieving women she studied had made a “creeping non-choice” which left them in their fifties with no children, or fewer than they wanted.

From the perspective of the teen mothers, the fifty-somethings who have just figured out the fertility cycle seem amazingly naïve and benighted in their thinking. They trusted in magic, too.

The most effective treatment of this kind of thinking is the one Hewlett recommends: ask these young women to describe what they want their families and work lives to be like at 45, then plan backwards to their current age. When they see what milestones need to be reached by when, and in what order, they are usually shaken, then moved to new action. I often get to see and share in the wonderful spectacle of smart people reordering their lives on the basis of true understanding and critical thinking.

Ultimately, the solution to magical thinking about work, marriage, and children at both ends of the social structure is the same: truth and critical thinking. And the sooner the better.

Doulas: A Good Centrist Family Idea

Doulas are “wise women of birth” who help pregnant women have a healthier and happier pregnancy, and then advise mothers through their baby’s infancy. High-end doulas work with upper middle class first-time moms for $1,000 per birth. A new movement has started among family helping agencies to employ doulas to assist the poorest and least-prepared mothers.

Centrists should, I think, support the idea of doulas at both ends of the economic spectrum. The high-end doulas are a market solution to the problem of professional-class women who have uprooted themselves from the experienced mothers of their own families. Subsidized doulas help the women and girls who need them most. Mothers benefit, children benefit, and the public benefits, including the long-term economic benefit of healthier babies and children.

A doula service can sensibly be found on both sides of the public/private divide. Government social service agencies could employ them just as readily as private family-support groups can. Tax money could be channeled through faith-based agencies for doulas without having to enter the minefield of church/state issues around contraception and birth control.

Every well-intentioned effort to help solve a problem can, of course, unintentionally create more of that problem. Nonetheless, I think providing help to inexperienced mothers who are already pregnant would not do much to add to the number of poor teens who get pregnant in the first place. It is also likely that a number of doulas, like the ones featured in Jodi Wilgoren’s recent New York Times story and the related PBS documentary, will be former poor teen moms themselves. Creating a doula service would give work to women who need it. Beyond the immediate help that they can give, women who learned the hard way about the difficulties of teen pregnancy may be the most effective counselors to teen mothers to keep them from having their second too-young pregnancy.

Elite Young Women Want Kids and Careers

Louise Story has an excellent piece in the New York Times this week, “Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood.” Story, a recent Yale grad and now an MBA student at Columbia, surveyed and interviewed over 200 Yale women, with some comparable information from other elite colleges. Many of the women she interviewed planned to start serious careers, but to suspend them to be home with their children.

The story is interesting for its main finding that many elite college women are planning to be home with their kids. I am also interested in the framing of the story – that these young women do not find it to be a big deal that they plan to be leaders in society by being stay-at-home moms. On the other hand, some of the Boomer feminists interviewed for the story are shocked that these young women are, as they see it, so backwards. “They are still thinking of this as a private issue; they're accepting it," said Laura Wexler, a professor of American studies and women's and gender studies at Yale. Cynthia E. Russett, on the other hand, a Yale professor from a pre-Boomer generation, says that, "The women today are, in effect, turning realistic."

As KC noted in the comment I responded to a couple of days ago, young women – Millennials, not Boomers or even Gen Xers – do put a high priority on arranging their lives to give the best of themselves to their children. For many, that means being full-time moms when their kids are little. I do not think that they are backward or ignorant of the ways in which “the personal is the political.” I believe, as Prof. Russett suggests, that they are being realistic. Unlike the pioneering women of Yale and places like it a generation ago, these high achieving women have read the research and can count the years from age 22 to the likely end of their childbearing years. They know that they can have it all IF they plan for marriage and children early.

The one important thing I thought was missing from Louise Story’s account is that she frames the choice these women face as either/or – either they have a career, or they have children. Yet life is long, long enough to do both. Women with degrees from Yale and other elite colleges could stay home with kids in their late twenties, all of their thirties, even into their forties, and still have a 25 or 30-year career. They won't lose their brains raising kids, and will gain an age of confidence, experience, and multi-tasking ability.

Why Mainline Church Leaders are Ambivalent About Promoting Marriage, Part I

Of all the institutions which could promote marriage, religious institutions are, I believe, in the best position to do the most good. Yet the leadership of mainline churches has not been in the forefront of the marriage movement. There are several reasons for this, including a fear of hurting single parents and a fear of prejudging the question of homosexual marriage. I will return to these issues in future posts.

My research on the Presbyterian Church (USA), one of the pillars of the mainline, struck me as revealing another powerful motive for being quiet about promoting marriage: church leaders are much more likely to be divorced.

When future Presbyterian ministers are in seminary their theology falls in a bell curve from conservative to liberal, with most calling themselves some kind of moderate or centrist. And seminarians all across the theological spectrum are equally likely to be married.

In later years, though, there is a dramatic shift, which suggests a strong connection between marriage and a more conservative position. In my book on strengthening the loyalist center of the church, Leading from the Center, I found this remarkable pattern:

“One of the most striking differences among Presbyterian ministers that develop after seminary is the ratio of married to divorced people in different groups. Among theological conservatives, there are 89 married ministers for every divorced one; for those in the center the ratio is 16 to one; for liberals, there are 7.7 married people for each divorced person. An extraordinary extension of this pattern is that for ministers in church agencies or judicatories (that is, presbyteries, synods, or General-Assembly-level bodies), the married-to-divorced ratio is 2.2 to one.”

The church bureaucracy is much more likely to be filled with divorced people. Indeed, I know of a number of cases of ministers who left their congregation following their own divorces, and ended up in church bureaucracy seemingly by default.

There is, I think, a complex relationship between marriage and theology, not all of which I understand now. It does seem clear to me, though, that a church leadership which is full of divorced people, and thus also of the colleagues and friends of divorced people, will be more ambivalent about promoting marriage.

Do Gen Xers Want Mom Home More Than Boomers Do?

In a comment on “Good News from New Orleans,” KC wrote:

I ask that you address the Millennium generation's divergence from feminist protocol of the 70's, 80's and 90's. It is my observation that many people in my generation, despite our youth, desire to work in the "real world" for a limited period of time. Eventually, many of us, women in particular, want to return to the home, with multiple children and live the life of an at-home mom. Some of us, myself included, would prefer the option of working from home (God bless the freedom of broadband technology), but most importantly to be at home. Thoughts...

I don’t have the data to answer your excellent question about the Millennial generation. I did take stab at asking about Gen X vs. the Baby Boomers, though. The General Social Survey, the annual survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center, had a special module in 1996 (when the oldest Millennials were only 15) on relationships. The respondents were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with this statement:

It is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.

I compared core Boomers, who were 40 to 50 years old that year, with core Gen Xers, who were 20 to 30 then. Comparing men to women within each group shows that while most member of each generation take a liberal (disagreeing) position on this question, the Xers tended to be more liberal than Boomers. 2/3rds of the Boomers disagreed with the statement, whereas 3/4ths of the Xers disagreed. Men and women answered about the same way, though the women were more likely to disagree strongly. Comparing married and not married people in each generation yields a similar result – the younger generation is a bit more liberal on this question.

I will look for data on the next generation.

Children and Marriage Go Together – Really.

Kathryn Edin, whose fine new book, Promises I Can Keep I wrote about earlier, was part of a panel on “Overcoming Barriers to Stable Marriage” at the Brookings Institution recently. In her Brookings testimony, Edin said:

“This is probably a profound cultural change[:] marriage and child-bearing among low-income men and women, white, black, and Hispanic, are no longer seen as decisions that necessarily go together. Here there are comparative ethnographic studies with middle class 20-somethings. And middle class 20-somethings almost never even consider having children outside of marriage. It's not that they're especially moral, they just literally can't imagine being able to sustain it, given all of the other things that fill their lives and make their lives so rich.”

Sociologists have a long-running debate about whether the basic family unit is mother-child, to which father is later added, or husband-wife, which then naturally produces children. I think nearly all human practices are a rich tangle of nature and nurture. As a rule of thumb, I assume those factors will be in a 50/50 mix. I incline to the view that the mother-child unit is what nature starts with in building families. The father-mother-child molecule is, I think, a great cultural achievement – perhaps the greatest single achievement of human culture. The couple-child family is so deeply embedded in all kinds of human civilizations that it seems natural. It has achieved “cultural hegemony” in Antonio Gramsci’s phrase – it is hard for us to even imagine an alternative.

However, as Edin notes, one American subculture has broken the cultural hegemony which connects children with marriage. The genie is out of the bottle. A generation of poor women – most especially African-American women – assumes kids, but only hopes for marriage. Realistically, though, few of them will achieve their dreams unless they change their ideas about marriage.

My point here is a different one, though. Some people look at the fact that one subculture has broken the link between children and marriage, and conclude that the whole culture should break that link. Since marriage is not naturally connected with childbearing, this argument goes, we should stop trying to impose a connection. Marriage is a personal lifestyle choice; having kids is a different personal lifestyle choice. Now that we are free from the unnatural hegemony of the idea that marriage and kids go together, freedom demands that we prevent the culture from imposing a connection between the two.

This is, I think, absolutely the wrong conclusion to draw. When we see that some part of the culture is not really required by nature but is, in some sense, socially constructed, that does not mean we should stop constructing it. On the contrary, the construction of a culture is a great human achievement. What we need is not a new naturalism, which only accepts what our (quite limited) animal nature imposes. Instead, we need a new, clear-eyed commitment to rebuilding civilization precisely because some social structures need to be socially constructed.

And the greatest of the socially constructed social structures, I submit, is marriage.

I had to share this

(From a twenty-something former student)

I enjoyed your blog tremendously; you are the oldest blogger I ever
knew in person.

Potty Parity is a Good Centrist Idea

Public facilities that handle crowds should have more women’s toilets than men’s. This is not fair, but it is just.

Well-known class action lawyer John Banzhaff III made the case for “potty parity” in 1990. Since then, 20 states and many cities have adopted ordinances that require anywhere from a 60/40 split of women’s to men’s toilets, to a 2:1 ratio. This past summer New York City passed the Women’s Restroom Equity Act requiring twice as many women’s toilets in arenas, bars, concert halls, convention halls, motion picture theatres, public dance halls, stadiums, and theatres.

Why is this necessary? Because women take longer in the restroom. They take longer because they have more clothes to manage. They take longer because they are more likely to have kids to manage. They take longer because they Just Do. Everyone would be better off if women did not have to wait longer to get into a restroom. This is pretty much a win-win rule.

So who is against it?

Critics on the left say that the law should be sex-blind, treating men and women exactly the same. Any different treatment, they say, even those that benefit women, reinforce stereotypes that women are weaker and in need of help. This reminds me of a lawyer I once heard of who argued that if the town had a dog leash license, the equal protection clause of the Constitution required that there also be a cat leash license. But this is a silly argument: recognizing real differences is sensible, not sexist. Equity does not require strict equality.

Critics on the right say this is an absurd example of overreaching and over-regulating by the “nanny state.” But this ignores the fact that the state has already shaped public facilities in a hundred ways to insure health, safety, and equal access. You would have to have a very strong stomach for mob panics and crowded collapses to be willing to let a big sports stadium or concert arena be built without any regulation at all.

Potty parity is a common-sense compromise that recognizes that men and women have different bodies and that they have different cultural customs and responsibilities.

Good News from New Orleans: The Crowds Weren’t Murderous, After All

Disasters usually bring people together. That made the reports of looting, rape, murder, and even attacks on rescuers after Hurricane Katrina so distressing – and so sociologically unlikely.

Turns out the good news is that the bad news was wrong. Christopher Shea reports that the worst stories – rapes in the Superdome, gunshots at a helicopter, carjackings in Baton Rouge by refugees – cannot be substantiated. The many murderers of the Big Easy took a holiday. Even the looting was largely people taking necessities.

Many have pointed out and lamented the racial difference in some news coverage – white people “found food,” black people “looted.” This is bad news about racial consciousness. But it can also be read, underneath, as good news about community. Most people in this dangerous disaster took care of themselves and those around them. They held themselves together, and went and found what they needed. I am confident that when the fuller story of Katrina is told, there will be many more stories of people sharing with the strangers around them and taking care of the weakest than there will be tales of depredation.

In fact, as I watched the interviews with trapped people from the Superdome and the convention center, from the many highway overpasses and isolated attics, I kept hearing family stories. Again and again they would interview a seemingly able-bodied person. I first wondered, “why are these people still there?” Were they stupid, clueless, or terminally feckless? The reporters’ questions sometimes seemed to carry the same assumptions. Yet as I listened to their stories, the most common refrain was, “I stayed to care for a vulnerable member of my family.” The mother with diabetes, the grandmother in a wheelchair, the sick babies, the uncle who needed dialysis.

At the time, these stories of sick relatives were told to show the desperate bad news of people who needed immediate rescue. But they are also part of a larger, better story: people who could have saved themselves put themselves in harm’s way to try to protect their needy kin and neighbors. The picture of the dead old woman in the wheelchair is very sad. But she, at least, had someone who pushed her from her home in the flood path to higher ground, where she had a better chance of survival. That wheelchair pusher could have walked him or herself right out of the city in the same time and with half the effort.

A few people did horrible things during the Hurricane – the nursing home owners who abandoned their charges to drown while they fled is the worst thing I have heard. But most did not. Most of the stories coming from New Orleans are of decent, even heroic people trying to save themselves and others.

Deliberate Childlessness: The Anti-Natalist (Mini-) Movement

My fellow Kentuckian, President Al Mohler of Southern Baptist Seminary, has created a stir by criticizing deliberate childlessness among fertile married couples. This is no more an organized movement than is the kind of natalism David Brooks talked about (see my post of yesterday). Still, not having children makes sense to a small but strategic group.

Some people think we are still faced with a population explosion. The industrialized countries have solved that problem in a big way. Some people don’t like kids. This is fair enough in a free country, though hard for me as a doting dad to empathize with.

I am concerned with another group, who think that they are not mature enough to have children. Probably more men feel this way than women. Children of divorce, as Judith Wallerstein has show, are especially likely to fear that they themselves may never be mature enough to have kids. This is sad. Worse, it means that a significant number of people are writing themselves off too soon.

Really, almost no one is ready to raise children when their first child is born. Marriage, and the willingness to do whatever it takes for your kids, transforms unprepared men and women into parents. This is also more true of men than women.

Why should centrists care about this as a policy matter? Why should I care if other people don’t think they should have children? A groundless fear that deprives one couple of the blessing of children is sad. A groundless fear that deprives the country of millions of fellow citizens, workers, taxpayers, and community makers creates an avoidable social weakness.

SO, reassuring those who are ambivalent about having children is a social benefit.

What does this have to do with Mohler’s “deliberately childless?” His criticism is drawn with a broad brush. He doesn’t distinguish between those who are afraid to have children, and those who are the real target of Mohler’s criticism: couples who are too selfish and materialistic to have kids. Yet most of them, I think, are ambivalent, too. You would have to be a cyborg libertarian to make the cold, Gary Becker-like calculation that kids are just an unattractive investment. Most of the deliberately childless have really slipped in to the “creeping non-choice” of waiting too long to decide to have children. The creeping non-choice will have to be the subject of another post (in the meantime, see Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s Creating a Life).

The Coming Natalist Movement

Americans don’t have enough kids to keep the population up.

We are blessed with immigrants, who both add instant population when they move here, and have more kids than the average American. But that seems to be a phenomenon of one generation. The United States, like all the other industrialized nations, has too few kids per native-born mother – under the replacement level of 2.1 kids (on average) per mother.

In the past there have been “natalist” movements in countries that thought their population was shrinking or not growing fast enough. Columnist David Brooks has talked about a natalist movement in this country, but he really just means that some Americans want to have a bunch of kids and live in places that are safe, cheap, and family-friendly. This is not so much a movement as a name for one smallish subsection of Americans, mostly quite religious people who are moving away from the big cities.

Demographer Ben Wattenberg has been lamenting the “birth dearth” for nearly two decades. He is critical, though, of government-run natalist movements, like those in Europe, where the birthrates and immigration rates are even lower than here. Italy, for example, has a fertility rate of 1.2 children per woman, whereas the U.S. is a bit under 2.

I agree that a government-run natalist movement would probably not work in this country. In fact, since many people believe that we have too many people, not too few, it would be politically disastrous to the administration which officially tried to encourage people to have more kids.

The American way to do just about anything, though, is for the movement to begin with the people, not the government. Some conservative religious groups already support family life as a blessed vocation. So far, though, I have not found an organized politically based natalist movement.

Centrists should seriously consider a movement with this modest goal: all stable married couples should think about having three kids. Each couple has different circumstances, of course, and not all couples can have all the children they want. But for the last generation the norm in the stable middle class has been that one or two kids was the responsible limit. The facts have changed: consider three.

The natural home for such a movement would be among conservatives, and therefore in the Republican Party. I think, in response to this natural inclination, that liberals and Democrats should take the lead in a new natalist movement. Supporting a more generous standard of how many kids we can afford is, after all, a liberal thing to do.