Unintelligent Non-Design

The “intelligent design” movement has been criticized as just the old theological creationism dressed up in bogus science. I think this is unfair – the observations of the natural world that intelligent design promoters rely on are just as empirical and careful as that of most scientists. They make a compelling case that some natural structures are so complex and functionally integrated that it would seem impossible for them to arise solely by small incremental mutations of previously existing structures. One possible explanation is that they were designed by a Designer. This sounds like exactly what the Bible says God does, but there are other possible theories of how there could be a Designer which was not the biblical God.

The science of intelligent design is good and modest, as most real science is. The possibility of design and a designer that it opens up is suggestive and interesting. Intelligent Design theory cannot prove that there is a Designer. And no other kind of theory, no matter how good its science, can prove that there is not a Designer.

Paul Bloom, a psychology and linguistics professor at Yale, has an intriguing article in the current Atlantic, “Is God an Accident?” He reports on fascinating research that he and others have done on how children understand physical things and psychological things. Little children understand that the body dies, but believe the mind lives on. Even infants seem to understand basic physical processes, like falling. Intriguingly, infants seem also to grasp basic social processes, like helping. These ideas do not arise simply from teaching and socialization.

Bloom has a theory of what to make of these empirical findings, which he expresses in this metaphor:

Understanding of the physical world and understanding of the social world can be seen as akin to two distinct computers in a baby’s brain, running separate programs and performing separate tasks.

From this metaphor, he develops a theory of the origin of religion. Our brains rightly understand the physical actions of physical objects, and the psychological actions of psychological objects. We then accidentally cross the two kinds of understanding, and infer the existence of two other kinds of phenomena: the psychological actions of physical objects, and the physical actions of psychological objects. From the first kind of inference, we make the error of anthropomorphizing, seeing intentions, will, and meaning in the actions of non-human, and even non-living objects. From the second kind of inference, we make the error of believing that things we imagine have physical existence. In other words, as Bloom says in conclusion, God is an “accidental by-product of our mental states.”

This is an intriguing idea. I can see its appeal as a way to solve the intellectual puzzle of why we believe in beings we cannot see. But Bloom distorts the possible alternatives to make his theory seem true and scientific. The only alternative theories for the origins of religion that he considers are that it is the opiate of the masses, a lie told by the powerful to bolster their power, or that it is a socially functional fraternity, based on an arbitrary set of beliefs enforced to hold a social group together. In other words, Bloom simply assumes that the only serious explanations for religion are secular ones. Is that a scientific conclusion? No, it is a premise, a belief statement. Does Bloom’s theory of the origin of religion rest on compelling new science? No, it rests on a metaphor – “akin to two distinct computers in a baby’s brain.” This is also a belief statement, one that we are not even meant to take literally.

As I noted at the outset, “intelligent design” has been criticized as just the old theological creationism dressed up in bogus science. Bloom’s “unintelligent non-design” is just the old atheism dressed up in bogus science.

Let’s keep the real science. And let’s stop pretending that it can explain things it can’t.

Happiness is Not the Main Point of Marriage

The National Fatherhood Initiative has just released “With This Ring,” a report on their new National Survey on Marriage in America. They generally found very strong support for marriage among all groups in society. The report also notes that very high proportions report that their marriages are very happy or very satisfying. Sixty-nine percent said their marriages were “very happy,” and 88 percent said they were either “completely satisfied” or “very satisfied” with their marriages.

In fact, the proportion saying that their own marriages are very happy is so high that some researchers think this really means that the respondents are just telling the survey givers what they want to hear or what is socially expected.

Another possibility that “With This Ring” considers is this:

A generally high level of marital quality is to be expected in a society, such as the United States, in which persons in unsatisfactory marriages are able, and often willing, to resort to divorce to deal with the situation. If poor marriages tend to end quickly, the average quality of intact marriages will be high, as is apparently the case in this country.

The authors of the report note that if poor marriages end easily, that is not really testimony to the strength of marriage as an institution. I think this is a fair point. A brutal divorce triage would weed out the weak marriages. This is probably a bigger cause of strong reports of marital happiness than is people lying to survey researchers.

I was struck, though, by what seems to me to be the bad effects of putting so much emphasis on marital happiness in the first place. Marriage has always been a complex institution. Even today, when most of the productive and governmental functions that families once had have been spun off to other institutions, most marriages serve multiple roles for the couple, their children, and society as a whole. Producing and rearing children, providing financially for both husband and wife through the ups and downs of each one’s work life, providing a discipline and structure for the lives of all the members of the family, and helping keep both husband and wife healthier in mind and body, are only some of the functions of marriage. And all of these roles are true benefits to the couple and to society even if, at any given time, husband or wife or both are not “very happy.”

Treating happiness as a primary function of marriage puts too much emphasis on happiness. The purpose of marriage is not to make you happy. Your purpose in marrying is not even to make your spouse happy. Most marriages are happy, and most married people are happier than they would be if they could not marry. Still, happiness should never be the prime measure of marital success. If we do take happiness, especially my individual happiness, to be the make-or-break measure of whether my marriage is working, then we will weaken marriage, indeed.

Happiness, like “self-esteem” and “community,” cannot really be achieved directly. Rather, they are by-product of doing other, more mundane but more substantial, actions.

Lawrence Summers Was Right the First Time

I was going to stay out of this one, but Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard, is still taking grief for remarks he made last January about women and science. This has been bothering me, so I will take this opportunity to weigh in.

In a conference on “Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce, “ President Summers was asked to offer “some attempts at provocation” on the question of “women's representation in tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions.” The full transcript of his remarks is available online.

This is the summary statement he opened with. I have turned it into a list for clarity.

There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference's papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions.
1. One is what I would call the … high-powered job hypothesis.
2. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and
3. the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search.
And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described.

Summers then gave a decent overview of the state of research on each of these points.

In the sensible corner of academia in which I live, this occasioned some interesting, calm conversation over the lunch table, in which the evidence for each point was the main relevant question. Moreover, on the meta-issue of whether one could even raise such questions in an academic setting, there was no controversy. Asking, and attempting to answer, such difficult questions is what the academy is for.

Alas, Harvard is, evidently, not as sensible a place as Centre College. When Summers made his remarks, there was an immediate uproar. Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, walked out on his talk, saying later that if she hadn't left, ''I would've either blacked out or thrown up." There were calls for his resignation. President Summers felt obliged to apologize repeatedly, set up not one but two task forces to hire more women in science and engineering, and to stop asking politically incorrect questions. Not Harvard’s finest hour.

The controversy has largely been over Summers’ second point. Yet it is well documented that there are more men than women at the highest levels of math ability. Not zero women, just fewer of them. And not in the broad middle of the population, where most of us live our daily lives, but at the highest levels. As Summers said, he was talking about the miniscule population that is three or three and a half standard deviations above the mean, from which the “tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions”are filled —which, let us remember, was the topic of the conference to which he was speaking.


But that is not the most important point. Note that the controversy was not over his main point, but on a secondary one. Summers offered that the main reason that women did not make up half of the top 25 science and engineering faculties was because women were less likely to want to devote their child-rearing years to spending 80-hour weeks in the laboratory. Lab sciences are the least child-friendly of all the academic disciplines. Any professional with a demanding career puts in long hours. But I was able to do some of my work as a sociologist at home when the kids were little, and the same was true with my wife’s legal work. I could also take my children to work on occasion, as could my wife. A lab scientist, on the other hand, pretty much has to spend all those long hours in the lab, away from home and children. Moreover, a scientific laboratory is one of the most dangerous work places that a child could go to.

Some women, of course, are willing to put in the long hours in the lab. Nancy Hopkins started working obsessively with James Watson when she was an undergraduate. Early in her career she would spend long hours in his Cold Stream lab, then take the ten-hour train trip home to her husband. Hopkins is a very eminent and accomplished biologist, and an important member of the MIT faculty. I can find no report that she has children. This life is her choice, and I don’t criticize it. But it is surely relevant in studying the proportion of women at the highest levels of science and engineering that these careers are among the most difficult to succeed in while raising children.

Religion Matters More When Kids Are Old Enough to Want Real Answers

Parents of small children are a not especially sold on religion – it is only when the kids get to school age, and especially when the children are teenagers, that parents definitely see the value of religion.

I was looking at the 2002 Religion and Public Life Survey, commissioned by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The survey asked several questions about the importance of religion in society, and especially for morality. They report the answers of those who have children under 18 at home, then break them down into those with kids under 5, with children 6 – 12, and with children 13 –17. In general, sheer parenthood is not a big differentiator on these questions. The age of the kids makes a bigger difference.

The Pew survey asked which of these two statements came closer to the respondents’ views:
A. Children are more likely to grow up to be moral adults when they are raised in a religious faith, or
B. Children are just as likely to grow up to be moral adults whether or not they are raised in a religious faith
Nearly everyone could choose one or the other. Overall, 62% of all respondents chose A. That is, nearly two thirds of Americans believe that adults will be more moral if they are raised religiously. Moreover, there is no difference between parents with kids at home (61%) versus other people (62%).

Yet when we look at parents of different ages of kids, we find an interesting pattern. Parents of children under 5 were less likely than other parents to think a religious upbringing was important – 57% to 64%. Yet the parents of middle schoolers reverse that pattern, with 63% saying yes, compared to only 59% of other parents. Parents of teens are even more likely to want a religious upbringing for their kids, with 65% answering yes, compared to the same 59% of other parents.

The survey then offered a parallel choice:
A. It is not necessary to believe in God in order to be moral and have good values, or
B. It is necessary to believe in God in order to be moral and have good values.
Again, the parents of the smallest children were likely to take the less religious answer. 57% chose option one, which shrank to a bare majority (50.2%) of the parents of teens.

These are, admittedly, not huge differences. Most American, parents or not, think that religion is important in raising up moral adults. But it is interesting that parents show an increasing appreciation of the importance of religion for moral upbringing as their children get older. The parents of teenagers are especially likely to seek religious help.

Raising Boys Without Men (Part Two)

“I have come to take a stand against the recent tide of opinion and the rash of books asserting that boys must have a father in the home in order to grow to full manhood.”

Thus Peggy Drexler begins her conclusion of Raising Boys Without Men.
Her conclusion is true. It is also a straw man.

There has not been a rash of books asserting that boys must have a father in order to grow to full manhood. There has been ample documentation, though – especially David Blankenhorn’s Fatherless America and David Popenoe’s Life Without Father – that boys are more likely to do better with a father than without. In any group, some will thrive despite risky conditions, and some will fail despite having all the advantages. Most members of the group, though, will respond in the normal way. That is the definition of normal. And most boys do better with a father than without. The fact that Drexler found a small, select group of boys who seem ok through middle school without a traditional father in their home is not really a disproof of the general claim.

Moreover, Drexler demonstrates the many ways in which the mothers she interviewed, especially in the lesbian couples, went out of their way to find father substitutes for their sons. The mothers, as well as the sons, sought out grandfathers, uncles, neighbors, mother’s male friends, coaches, and teachers, to be male role models for their sons. This is an admirable work-around for what the mothers themselves saw as a potentially risky absence in their sons’ lives. Most interestingly, in the lesbian couples, the birth mother tended to act like a traditional mother, and the “social mother” tended to act like a father. The single mothers, likewise, turned to “the village” for all kinds of help with their children, especially for men to be father-like to their sons.

As I noted yesterday, Drexler’s core concern, that sons raised only by mothers would suffer from “smotherlove” and be sissified, seems surprisingly old-fashioned. A more pressing question of the past decade has not been about boys with too much mothering, but boys with too little fathering. Fatherless boys cause most of the social problems that we face in America. Groups of fatherless boys – slum gangs – are the greatest domestic terror threat, posing a far greater danger than Al Qaeda or the white supremacist militias. (Those groups, by the way, seem to be disproportionately made of fatherless boys, too).

The boys that Peggy Drexler studied seem to pose no threat to society. On the contrary, the picture she presents is of boys who are unusually thoughtful and sensitive. Why are they so different from that other, more dangerous group of fatherless boys?

First, Drexler is only showing us these boys as boys. The subjects of her study had not even finished high school when the study ended. We do not see many of them in the real danger years.

Second, the enduring legacy of divorce that Judith Wallerstein writes about comes when the children of divorce attempt to marry, which they often delay for years. Only a few of Drexler’s subjects are the children of divorce. It would be interesting to see how this grab-bag of sons of “maverick moms” – lesbian couples, single-mothers-by-choice, divorced, widowed, and never-married mothers – made marriages of their own. My guess is that the children of divorced and never-married mothers would follow the pattern Wallerstein found, though this group, which Drexler seems to have selected because they are high functioning, will probably do a bit better than average. The kids of widows, single-by-choice, and lesbian moms will probably be more confident than the divorced kids that they can marry successfully, because they are less likely to feel that their fathers abandoned them. But only time, and a systematic research plan, will tell.

Third, and most important, Drexler obscures the difference that class makes in the lives of these boys. For her original study, Drexler chose stable, educated, older, white, business and professional couples. They appear to live in neighborhoods of similar families. These boys are worlds away from the sons of poor, young, single mothers in slums where few households contain stable couples of any kind. For Drexler’s main subjects, money helps keep their home and neighborhood stable and secure, and goes a long way to underwriting the “village” of coaches, teachers, and men-at-a-distance who fill in the gaps in the boys’ lives. Moreover, the lesbian couples’ families are, as far as we are told, very small – the focal boy, and maybe another child – so the double income of their white-collar mothers is not spread over many other kids. Drexler’s second set of “maverick moms, “ most of whom are single, are not as rich, and appear to have more kids. Still, with only a few exceptions, this is a middle-class-or-better sample.

Raising Boys Without Men is an interesting, but very limited, study. If it were called Raising a Boy With Functional Moms, Money, and Lots of Helpful Men and Women, Though Without Fathers in the Home, the book would be more honest, if a bit less surprising.

Raising Boys Without Men (Part One)

In Raising Boys Without Men, Peggy Drexler praises a group of “maverick moms” – lesbian couples, single mothers by choice, and a variety of single mothers not by choice – for raising the next generation of “exceptional men.” The core of the book is Drexler’s study of 16 boys raised by lesbian couples in San Francisco in the 1990s. She then supplemented this dissertation work with interviews with another 60 single mothers, half who had chosen to raise sons alone, half who had not. The lesbian couples, who make up the bulk of the analysis and examples in the book, are white, educated, white-collar, older women in stable relationships.

Drexler, a long-married mother, approaches the issue with some rather old-fashioned questions. Will boys raised by women only be sissies? Will boys raised by lesbians be gay? Sociology in the fifties and early sixties was concerned that over-mothered boys would not be manly enough. That question was largely laid to rest in the decade or so following. Likewise, research from the seventies and eighties found that children of homosexual parents were no more likely than average to be homosexual themselves, though they were more likely to be liberal in their attitudes toward sexual orientation.

Drexler did find that these boys were normal boys in most respects. They were typical boys in their interests and their play. I was pleased and a little surprised to find that Drexler expected this, as she agrees that much of the gendered activity of children is hardwired, and not simply the result of social convention and socialization.

Indeed, Drexler’s stronger claim is that the sons of lesbian couples are more sensitive to emotions and social relations than average boys are. Far from being morally retarded by growing up in a female-run household, Drexler seems to be saying that this small group of boys is morally superior to the average lad. She also seems to be making the same claim for the sons of the single mothers she studied, though it is hard for me to be certain about this as there are no real quantities reported here.

Drexler sets out to answer a too-easy question: Is it possible for lesbian couples and single women to raise good boys and men? It is practically a sociological truism that it is possible for good individuals to arise from any social circumstance, no matter how risky. The more difficult sociological question is, are lesbian couples and single mothers as likely to produce good boys and men as stable heterosexual couples are? Drexler’s sample is much too small, and much too select, to answer that question. Moreover, other research makes me think that she is mixing apples and oranges. Stable, two-parent couples generally produce better outcomes for kids than single parents do, regardless of any other factors. Calling lesbians couples, single-moms-by-choice, and women who become single mothers by divorce, widowhood, or inadvertent never marrying all “maverick moms” obscures very large differences among those groups.

Peggy Drexler did, I think, demonstrate her main point – sons of lesbian couples grow up to be regular guys. There are other questions, though, that her study raises, but does not fully answer.

Fighting the Culture of Fear is THE Centrist Issue

Extremists try to win the hearts and minds of the majority through fear. The culture of fear is equally a weapon of the left and the right. What they most want you to fear is what will happen if the other side wins.

Barry Glassner published a good book, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things, in 1999. He details the ways in which many of the things which are high on most Americans’ fear lists – pregnant teen girls and murderous teen boys, rising rates of drug use and violent crime, epidemic new diseases and plane crashes – are actually quite rare, and most of them are getting better. From recent news we might add a fear of pedophiles and serial killers, and, of course, terrorism. Glassner’s point holds true about these fears, as well: they are rare, and they are not getting more frequent.

Michael Moore made a similar point in Bowling for Columbine. In talking about shooting deaths, he used the wonderfully rich comparison of the United States and Canada. Both societies have many guns and a gun-accommodating culture. Yet their gun death rate is a small fraction of ours, even when adjusting for their much smaller population. Moore attributes the difference to a different culture – American culture promotes fear much more than Canadian culture does. Indeed, in the middle of the film, Moore interviews Barry Glassner about the culture of fear, while they are both standing at the street corner in South Central Los Angeles which was the heart of the Rodney King riots. Presumably, two middle-aged white guys – geeky, slow, obviously defenseless white guys, at that -- should have been at risk and felt fear in the heartland of black rage against white society. (In fact, most of the perpetrators of the Rodney King riots were Mexican-Americans, and most of the shop-keeping victims were Asian-Americans – but that did not fit the CNN story line). Yet, sensibly, they were not fearful, and were treated in a civil, even friendly, fashion by everyone they met.

Television is particularly egregious in selling fear. Television is actually, I think, a very bad way to find out what is going on. Television is driven by a need to show pictures. Most important things that happen do not produce interesting pictures. Most real news, in other words, does not make good television. So television shows good pictures – fires, car collisions, plane crashes, bombings, riots, shot and beaten bodies, and, when all else fails, crying victims of the above. These pictures give us the impression that these are the most newsworthy events. Rarely is that so. Since most people get their news from television, this mistaken impression is widespread in society. The cable news stations, if anything, make the problem worse, by repeating a few shocking headlines and pictures, and filling the rest of the time with reporters’ opinions. Local news stations answer the cable challenge with “how your innocuous possessions can kill you” stories. The best television news show, the PBS “Newshour,” is very boring television, indeed – all talking heads, with almost no pictures at all. And the “Daily Show” is a funny parody, but it is frankly fake.

Of course there are real threats in the world. There are terrorists, and tsunamis, and tsetse flies. But for most people most of the time, these are distant threats. Yes, millions die every day, and many of them from preventable causes. But the cause of prevention is also advancing every day, too. The fact that we know about deaths from around the world does not show that there are more deaths around the world, as much as it shows the great improvement in our news-gathering capacity. The fact that the 2004 tsunami was a worldwide cause for compassion shows improvement in the world. Even in the most dangerous places in the world, most people live without being attacked. Many of the bad things that happen in the world – drug addiction, alcoholism, gun-shot wounds, sexually transmitted diseases – mostly happen to people who live risky lives. If you don’t fool around with drugs, booze, guns, and sex, you are very unlikely to suffer any of these bad outcomes.

Sociology is a great help in combating the culture of fear. Sociology, more than any other science, in concerned with distinguishing the normal from the rare. We look at the whole bell curve, to see what is likely to happen to most people, and which things happen only rarely or mostly to those who live in the extreme ends of society. Of course, we should fight bad things, even if they are rare or are only likely to happen to other people.

But we need not succumb to a culture of fear. The facts, I believe, support a culture of cheerfulness.

Choice vs. Faithfulness in Family Life

In the seventies family life was reconstructed to make adults free to choose the family lives they wanted. The promise of “families we choose”was that family life would be happier and more satisfying. No-fault divorce would end unhappy marriages. Easy birth control and abortion on demand would mean there would be no unwanted children. Cohabitation before marriage would end naïve marital choices. Reducing the stigma of divorce, unmarried parenting, cohabitation, abortion, and homosexual relations would widen the spectrum of “family.”

However, as Francis Fukuyama argued convincingly in The Great Disruption, the sixties and seventies disrupted traditional ways of arranging society in the name of freedom, without putting any better social arrangements in their place. Indeed, as things have played out since then, the new social arrangements have produced many new social problems, without solving the old ones. The American Paradox, David Myers argues, is that today Americans feel materially rich, but spiritually poor. Norval Glenn, a leading family sociologist, has shown that while most people are still happy with their marriages, fewer report being very happy compared to forty years ago.

The problem, I think, is that family life is not based on choice, but on faithfulness. The problem with the religion of choice is that it does not let you actually choose anything. Any choice made now forces you to give up other choices in the future. If, on the other hand, you try always to keep your options open, you never get to live any particular kind of life fully.

The conflict shows up most clearly when we are talking about marriage. As Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher demonstrate in The Case for Marriage, marriage can change lives because of the Power of the Vow. We choose our mates. More importantly, we choose never to choose another, barring death. That is what gives marriage its power. Choosing to live a married life with one particular woman is what makes the extraordinary change in men. Single men live the life of “options.” They have lots of choices, but many fewer accomplishments. Married men are the most productive economic group in society because they have given up the life of many options, and are living the life of their one great choice.

When we say “choice” now, it first calls to mind the choice about abortion. Easy abortion was supposed to end unwanted children. It didn’t. There are many factors which contribute to the problem of unwanted children. Still, a pro-choice attitude toward children, however much it may free women to live as they choose, has the unintended effect of undermining commitment to the children who are born, and to children in general.

As a society, the growth of choice about every aspect of family life – and genetic design of children and cloning are on the horizon, expanding the world of family choice – has, paradoxically, undermined our collective commitment to actual families.

Choice is a virtue in a society. But it is a secondary virtue. Faithfulness is a primary social virtue. When choice serves faithfulness, society is better. When choice displaces faithfulness as a high social virtue, society suffers. And the institution of society that depends most on faithfulness, commitment, reliability, and the Vow, is family life.

Marry Your Baby Daddy – The Book

Earlier I wrote about Marry Your Baby Daddy Day, a contest in which a group of couples who had a child together and the intention to marry someday were given an an-expenses-paid wedding, arranged by novelist Maryann Reid and Rev. Herbert Daughtry. Rev. Daughtry supplied the church and conducted the services. Ms. Reid wrote the novel, Marry Your Baby Daddy, which inspired the contest. Having been intrigued by the concept, I thought it only fair to read the novel, too.

The premise of the novel is that the loving grandmother of the three Anderson sisters has died. Each Anderson woman has a child with a man she sort-of wants to marry. To their surprise, grandma died with money – three million dollars worth. It will all come to them – if they each marry their “baby daddy” within six months. Romantic complications ensue.

Let me say at the outset that “chick lit” is not my genre, and black chick lit is terra incognita. I am not the target demographic. This is fine – in this great country of ours, there is room for every kind of reader and every genre of writing. Someday I will blog about my favorite genre, fast-paced church history. (I’m sure you can’t wait).

The women range in age from late-twenties to mid-thirties, and in class from the corporate lawyer big sister to the successful hairdresser middle child to the file clerk little one. The men include the sweet one who wants to marry, the decent one who doesn’t want the bother, and the handsome tomcat who is by turns sweet and brutal. Oh, and there is a handsome lawyer handling the estate. I am guessing that experienced readers of the genre could fill in the rest. But novelty is not the point of popular genres. My wife reads mysteries every night, not for the puzzle so much as to be drawn into the setting and the nuance of familiar kinds of characters. The evocation of the particularities of New York black culture, especially in the Brooklyn settings, is engaging. The communication among the sisters, who have only one another to rely on, is believable and really the emotional core of the story.

I was struck by a few features, though, that I couldn’t simply attribute to the genre. For one thing, nearly every chapter contains a detailed sex description. In the “Sex and the City” literary world (as opposed, of course, to real life), is this customary? Moreover, there was not a single married father in the story. We infer that grandma has been married to produce her granddaughter’s mother, but he is so long gone his departure is not even described. The sisters’ mother killed herself when the girls were young. There is no mention at all of their father or fathers, nor a suggestion that her mother ever married. I won’t be spoiling the ending to say that some of the baby daddies become married fathers by the end, but only in that order, and only under extraordinary conditions.

The poor teen moms in Promises I Can Keep, which I wrote about earlier, grow up in a world without married fathers. These women, black, white, and Hispanic, are shaped by their poverty as much as their ethnic culture. The fictional women of Marry Your Baby Daddy, on the other hand, are above poverty. Marriage is not an economic decision for them, but an emotional one. Their questions are, am I ready to settle down, and do I want to settle down with this man? Even in the end, one of the new wives does not want to commit on whether her marriage is permanent.

Jane Austen wrote the great classic chick lit about, and for, women seeking to be wives and (then) mothers. (And wonderful moral tales they are, too, which I admire hugely, lest anyone thing I am disrespectful of the great Jane). Bridget Jones, for all her near-parody of Jane Austen, still seeks the same thing. Marry Your Baby Daddy rests on a different premise, or at least a wildly different order of operations. Is this typical? I would welcome your comments.

She Who Gets Custody Files First

Margaret Brinig, a law professor at the University of Iowa, has done several interesting studies of divorce law. I especially commend one co-authored with Douglas Allen with the wonderful title, ”’These Boots are Made for Walking’: Why Most Divorce Filers Are Women.” This work was brought to my attention by a comment on a the recent blog, “Divorce Divides Children.”

Brinig’s interesting finding is that “who gets the children is by far the most important component in deciding who files for divorce, particularly when there is little quarrel about property.” Women are much more likely to file for divorce than men – at a rate of two to one in many states. In states in which the mother is presumed to get sole custody of the couple’s children, she is much more likely to file for divorce. Joint custody rules reduce the likelihood that women will file more often than men.

Even more interestingly, joint custody rules make it less likely that either party will file for divorce in the first place. Brinig suggests that this is due, in part, to the fact that divorcing spouses often use custody filings to hurt their soon-to-be ex. Sole custody is a powerful sledgehammer against an ex. Joint custody is more like staying married.

Elizabeth Marquardt makes clear that joint custody does not make it any easier for kids to avoid being divided by divorce, and may make that feeling worse. But the main point is that it would be better for children – and parents – if there were fewer divorces to begin with.

When divorce is even on the table, all the choices are tragic. Margaret Brinig’s research about the effect of custody rules on filing, though, is a help in assessing joint custody as a tool in reducing divorce.

The “Adults First” Divorce Culture Lives On

Yesterday I posted “Divorce Divides Children” from San Antonio, where I was attending a conference. Later that morning I opened the San Antonio Express-News, and found a story typical of the problem the I have been writing about: the divorce culture that thinks divorce is about the adults’ happiness, without even asking about the children.

“An amicable divorce can benefit everyone,” by Express-News staff writer Jeanie Tavitas-Williams, reported on The Unofficial Guide to Getting a Divorce, by Russell and Susan Wild. The paper reports that “with 22 years of marriage behind them, two children, a decent portfolio, property and all kinds of other personal, financial and emotional entanglements, both acknowledge they had ‘all the ingredients that could have made for a ….’” How would you expect that sentence to end? Good marriage? Effective partnership? Secure home? No, to the Wilds, those are the ingredients of a “nasty divorce."

The Wilds did divorce. Yet the tone of the story is congratulatory. The story continues, “Yet today, fewer than two years after their union was legally dissolved, the Pennsylvania residents are good friends. They live about three blocks away from each other, have dinner together (kids included) most every Tuesday, even have keys to each other's homes.” If they had all that going for them, and still do, why did they divorce? Because, Russell Wild says, they “had exhausted all of their efforts to regain the spark before finally ‘throwing in the towel.’"

My gripe is not with the Wilds. To me, it would seem that two people who are capable of such an amicable divorce, are also capable of an amicable marriage. But I don’t know all the facts from a newspaper story, and won’t judge the Wilds.

My gripe is with the reporter, the newspaper, and the dozens of other stories like this one that you can find any month in newspapers, women’s magazines, men’s magazines, and, especially, “relationship” television and radio shows.

No one asked about the children. The reporter does not tell us what the parents think their divorce did to their children. She did not report on the growing body of expert evidence, such as Elizabeth Marquardt’s or Judith Wallerstein’s work, which details the enduring legacy of divorce on children. She did not, evidently, think to ask the children themselves what they thought of this “amicable” relationship.

With other kinds of stories, reporters have a normal routine: first report what the more powerful parties in a conflict are doing, then investigate the effects on the less powerful. If they were reporting, say, a school strike, they would interview the administration, interview the teachers, and then talk to parents and kids, or at least to some sort of experts about the effect on parents and kids. Our current divorce culture, though, treats divorce as something that adults do. The effects on kids are not a normal part of the story, are not in the reporters’ and editors’ standard calculation of affected parties.

So this is my plea: when anyone reports on a divorce, either a particular divorce or on divorce as an institution, always ask “what about the children?” Ask, and tell.

Divorce Divides Children

Elizabeth Marquardt’s main point in Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce is, as the title suggests, that children of divorce grow up divided because they are never fully at home. She reports with great subtlety about the routine ways in which divorced kids learn to keep secrets from their parents, and even to lie to one parent so as not to betray the other. She makes clear that joint custody is not the happy solution that some divorced parent activists promote, because it keeps the child perpetually uprooted. Divorce takes children from being the center of one nuclear family, to a perpetual guest in two new families,

The core problem of divorce for children is that even in the best divorce, the child can never have a full life with both mother and father. All of Marquardt’s subjects were chosen because they had kept contact with both parents. We know from other research that a quarter to a half of all divorced children lose all contact with their fathers after a few years. The luckier ones who keep ties to both parents are still divided in their lives, loyalties, and longings. The divorced kids who lose a parent altogether are like emotional amputees.

I have known a number of children of divorce, some of whom have gone on, like Marquardt, to be successful in their education, their careers, their civic lives, and, most impressively, in their own marriages and childrearing. Yet, as Marquardt would be the first to acknowledge, the divorce always leaves scars. Divorced kids are more prone to become anxious over difficulties in their marriages. One of the reasons that children of divorce are more likely to divorce themselves, despite their deathly fear of divorce, is because they either marry impulsively, or throw in the towel too soon. It is hard for children of divorce to believe that they really know how to make a successful marriage, even if other people do.

I find that I can usually tell after knowing a student for a little while whether his or her parents are still together.

Divorce is one of many experiences that scar children. Compared to growing up with violence, or drunkenness, or drug addiction, divorce leaves relatively mild scars. But it always does. Marquardt says that she is not trying to condemn divorced parents, like her own mother and father. Rather, she wants everyone to see that “divorce happy talk” is a self-serving lie that parents tell when they want to convince kids that what is good for the parents is also good for the children.

Divorce’s Religious Effects

Elizabeth Marquardt’s Between Two Worlds, which I have reported on in my two previous blogs, rests on a study which ultimately has a religious purpose. The National Survey on the Moral and Spiritual Lives of Children of Divorce, which Marquardt directed with Norval Glenn, was paid for by the Lilly Endowment, as part of their ongoing studies of the social effects of religion. And Marquardt’s findings on religion are among the most interesting and unprecedented in the study.

Children of divorce are less likely to be involved in organized religion. This fact has been reported before. But when children of intact and divorced families were asked how spiritual they considered themselves to be, nearly 3/4ths of each group answered “fairly” or “very” spiritual. Almost all from each group (90% and 86%, respectively) reported attending religious services as a child. The divorced kids, though, were more likely to report that they lost their early church in the divorce. Sometimes when the parents stop going, the divorced kids will start attending religious services by themselves. The children of divorce are, if anything, more serious in their search for meaning, order, and spiritual direction in their lives. Indeed, despite the generally lower church membership of divorced kids compared to kids from intact families, divorced kids are somewhat more likely to report that they are born-again or evangelical Christians, though they were no more likely to have been raised that way.

The study asked what the respondents made of the “prodigal son” story in the Bible. The two groups differed starkly in their responses. The children from intact families were likely to identify with the prodigal being welcomed home by loving parents, based on their own lives or those of siblings or friends. The divorced kids, on the other had, were more likely to identify with the parent, welcoming the prodigal home – only in their case the roles were reversed; their parents were in the role of the prodigal. This response is of a piece with the common effect of divorce in making the children, especially the eldest, adults before their time. Similarly, the intact family kids could respond straightforwardly to the commandment to “honor their father and mother,” especially if they were now married parents themselves. The children of divorce, on the other hand, found this commandment harder to embrace, or even understand.

The most fascinating, and poignant, religious responses of divorced kids come from their attempts to relate to “God the Father.” For many, their own bad experiences with their fathers spoiled the whole biblical vision of God for them. This difficulty, among others, likely contributed to children of divorce being less churched as adults. On the other hand, a subset of the divorced kids found great comfort in religion – God was the father they did not have in their own family life. These kids were more likely to have gotten themselves to church as a way to cope with the divorce. I expect that it is this group that produces the higher-than-expected rates of born-again and evangelical Christians.

One religious message of Between Two Worlds is that children of divorce, even high-functioning adult children of divorce, yearn for God and a supportive religious community. Precisely because they are torn between two worlds in their parents’ homes, they are more in need of a unified and supportive religious home. The superficial secularity of divorced kids hides a religious need and want which is, if anything, even greater than that of children from intact homes.

What’s Wrong with the Good Divorce

In Elizabeth Marquardt’s Between Two Worlds, she reports on a valuable new study which compares children from five different kinds of marriages: happy ones, low-conflict unhappy ones, high-conflict unhappy ones, bad divorces, and good divorces. The key comparison is between kids who were raised in unhappy but low-conflict marriages, versus the children of good divorces.

Marquardt’s point is that even the best divorces leave deep scars in kids. This survey, and the detailed interviews which expanded on it, was designed to go beyond normal divorces studies to look at the quality of divorces, and their effects.

Let’s look at a few statistics:

I always felt like an adult, even when I was a kid:
Low conflict: 39%
Good divorce: 51%

I often missed my father:
Low conflict: 38%
Good divorce: 56%

I felt the need to protect my mother emotionally:
Low conflict: 36%
Good divorce: 44%

I generally felt emotionally safe:
Low conflict: 93%
Good divorce: 82%

I was alone a lot as a child:
Low conflict: 21%
Good divorce: 30%

As Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher reported in The Case for Marriage, kids often don’t see their family as unhappy, even when the parents do. As the survey shows, they kids in unhappy marriages still overwhelmingly feel emotionally safe themselves. They have much better relations with their parents. They were not left alone as much.

One of the common effects of divorce is that children are “adultified” or “parentified” – forced to be mature and self-sufficient. At the time, this often seems like a good thing, a sign that the child is adjusting well. In truth, this is one of the longest lasting scars. Children of divorce often date the end of their childhood from the moment they heard their parents were divorcing. Being little adults means they lose being kids, which they miss later.

Half the children of good divorces lose their childhoods with the divorce.

A “Good Divorce” is Still a Divorce

Elizabeth Marquardt’s new book, Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce, will be the big news in the dialogue about divorce this year. Marquardt, a researcher with the Institute for American Values, worked with leading family sociologist Norval Glenn to survey hundreds and interview dozens of adult children of divorce. This work is in the spirit of Judith Wallerstein’s foundational work on the long-term effects of divorce on children, and Wallerstein wrote the preface to Marquardt’s book. Just as important as the research, Marquardt is herself the child of a “good divorce.” She has successfully married and has children. And yet, she knows that she herself was scarred by the divorce. This first-person book recounts her own experience, as well as that of her research subjects.

Most children of divorce do not show severe trauma. They have much higher rates of mental and emotional problems – twice or thrice the rate of kids from intact families – but still, most turn out ok. OK, but still marked. Marquardt pursues the question of divorce’s long-term effects past the gross dysfunctions – dropping out, taking drugs, becoming drunks, having marginal jobs, and, especially, divorcing themselves – to find the inner cost to outwardly functional adults.

As I have previously discussed, most divorces come from low-conflict marriages. Marquardt’s main conclusion is that even the best divorce is still worse than an unhappy, low-conflict marriage. Better, that is, for the kids. Adults may think that what is better for them is better for everyone. But it is not. Marquardt writes carefully, so as not to blame divorced parents, especially her own. But the main point remains – even a good divorce is still just a divorce.

Is Saying No to Kids a Failure, or a Necessary Discipline?

The Los Angeles Times had a well-done story yesterday, “The Mommy Shift Begins When the Nanny Shift Ends,” by Anna Gorman. It compares the lives of two married mothers living in different parts of Los Angeles. The difference is that Stacey, an upper-middle class mother of four, hires Margoth, an immigrant from El Salvador with three of her own, to help care for Stacey’s children for most of the day. At six, Margoth can go home to her own kids, and begin her second shift of momming.

Stacey is hugely appreciative of Margoth – Stacey doesn’t like the term “nanny,” and refers to Margoth as a “co-parent.” Margoth is happy with her work, except that it takes her so much from her own children. Stacey does not have a job, but needs the help so she can cope, and so she can have some free time of her own.

This is a good and interesting story. I suspect that one of the reasons that it is a “most emailed” story on the Times’ list is for its implicit critique of inequality. I do not see it that way; Margoth and her husband, also an immigrant, are making it in America by hard work, in the time-tested manner of immigrants. In two generations, their descendents will be hiring help, too. Maybe even in one generation. I don’t think Stacey is selfish for hiring another mom to leave her children to care for Stacey’s, so Stacey can have a life outside the home. Stacey is creating a job, and bucking the trend of too-small families.

What interested me, instead, was this line: “Stacey says she reserves the word ‘no’ for big things. Margoth says she doesn't hesitate to tell her children no.”

Stacey and her husband provide everything for their children. They provide material things, have arranged for Stacey to be home with her children, and, at considerable expense compared to their income, have Margoth to “co-parent” for their kids. For Stacey’s family, being able to provide everything for their kids is one of the greatest measures of their success in life – perhaps the greatest. Stacey’s husband was not interviewed for the article, but I expect he would say that that is what he works so hard and long for. From that perspective, if Stacey ever has to say no to her children, it feels like a failure. Unless the kids actually want to do something dangerous, they should be free from constraint to realize their desires. That is what money is for.

To Margoth, though, children need discipline to learn how to control themselves and avoid temptation. Her children can recite the litany their mother tells them all the time: “Do your homework. Stay out of trouble. Keep away from gangs.” For Margoth, saying no to her children is a gift – the gift of the habit of discipline.

The top and bottom classes differ significantly in how the best parents – like Stacey and Margoth – raise their children. This was the same difference that Adrie Kusserow wrote about in American Individualisms. Part of this difference is due to the different dangers that kids in different classes face. Stacey’s kids are not likely to be tempted by gangs, which is one of the reasons that Margoth says that if she won the lottery, she would move her family to Stacey’s neighborhood. She would lose her network of friends and relatives, but she would also lose the many threats to her kids that poor neighborhoods have.

But different threats is only part of the reason that the classes discipline kids differently. Margoth’s kids need a deep self-discipline and a work ethic like their mother’s to rise in class and status. Stacey’s kids were born already in a comfortable class and status. They have the resources to do just about whatever they want. What Stacey wants for her kids is that they have the internal freedom to take advantage of their external, material freedom.

With each strength, though, comes a complementary weakness. If Margoth’s kids learn to be disciplined, hard-working, and self-sacrificing for their families, they run the risk of being stingy, judgmental, and hard-hearted toward others without the same discipline. If Stacey’s kids learn to be free, risk-taking, and self-asserting, they run the risk of being undisciplined, self-destructive, and arrogant.

Here, though, I think the parallel ends. The bad things that Margoth’s kids might learn from hearing “no” regularly are far outweighed by the good that can come to them and to society from learning discipline and work. The bad things that Stacey’s kids risk from never being told “no,” on the other hand, are very bad indeed, for themselves and for society. Disciplined working class kids build the nation; undisciplined owning class kids tear the nation down.

Just say “no.”

Would Disestablishing Marriage Be Like Disestablishing Religion?

In Marriage: A History, Stephanie Coontz argues (following Nancy Cott) that what we are seeing now is the disestablishment of marriage, on the analogy of the disestablishment of the old state churches. Traditional marriage is not disappearing. Rather, it is losing its long-time monopoly of legitimate forms of close relations. Henceforth, this theory argues, marriage will have to compete with all other forms of close relations in a free market.

I think that disestablishment is good for religion. Lyman Beecher, who had been a minister in the state-supported Congregational Church in Connecticut, fought its disestablishment in 1818. Later, after he experienced the freedom from state control, and the renewed spiritual vigor of the independent church, he changed his mind. In his autobiography, he called disestablishment “the best thing that ever happened to the state of Connecticut. It cut the churches loose from dependence on state support. It threw them wholly on their own resources and on God.” Monopolies get lazy; competition helps them remain vigorous, or go to the wall. The United States has a vibrant religious life, and Europe does not, because we have a genuinely competitive market in religion.

So would a free market in marriage be a good thing? Would traditional marriage – one man, one woman, for life, raising their own children – be stronger if it had to compete with polygamy, gay marriage, polyamory, serial monogamy, casual sex, ritual fellatio in men’s societies as among the Sambia, lesbians with cloned children, temple prostitution, berdache unions, incest, etc., etc., etc? Coontz is right that marriage, for long centuries, was whatever the couple and their families told the world it was. It was only later that the church and the state regularized marriage, creating a public ritual with real spiritual and legal consequences.

No, I don’t think so. Church and State made marriage a public institution in the first place to protect women and children, who were routinely abused and exploited under the cover of the “private” family. Women need less protection now than they once did, but children are as vulnerable as ever, and always will be. And mothers of young children are still vulnerable, and that, I think, is not likely to ever change, either.

When churches were disestablished, it meant that the playing field was leveled between the one monopolistic state church and the many competing sects. It was part of the ideal of the church that society only needed one, but dissident individuals kept creating those pesky sects. Eventually, both church and sect were forced to accommodate and become denominations within the larger currency of religion – to the benefit of both.

The analogy with marriage would be if there were only one family in society. This is not way off the mark. In monarchical societies, the Royal Family is a thing apart, with privileges, responsibilities, property rights, and prerogatives different in kind from all other families. Yet even in the most absolute monarchies, the royal family did not argue that it should be the only family in society. The Bourbons did not exclude the existence of other families, not even among peasants. In totalitarian societies, the Maximum Leader did not have the one and only family. In Plato’s authoritarian fantasy in The Republic the guardian class gives up separate families, but other classes keep theirs. Utopian communities attempt to live as one family, but the only enduring examples had to be celibate communities.

Disestablishing the institution of marriage is not like disestablishing the institutional church. Everyone can create an “established” marriage; there can only be one “established” church. In the United States we disestablished the One Church, but support and accommodate many different kinds of religious institutions. This is because even the most deistical of our Founding Fathers thought that religious institutions were a public good and made better citizens. Marriage as an institution is also a public good. It not only makes better citizens, it is by far the most effective way to make competent human beings.

What we are threatened with today is not the disestablishment of marriage, but the complete privatization of all close relations. The religious analogy would not be disestablishment of the church, but a complete privatization of religious belief, including driving all religious institutions from the public square. Some people want to drive religion from public life altogether, but most Americans have resisted these secularizers, and for good reason. Now, some people want to drive marriage from public life altogether. They should also be resisted, and for much the same reasons.

When It Comes to Abortion, the Husband is Not Just Another Guy

A peculiarity of American abortion law, and of the Roe v. Wade decision on which it rests, is that husbands are not part of a married woman’s abortion decision. Doctors are, but husbands aren’t. This shows who has a more powerful PAC in Washington. Our abortion laws are very unusual in the world even compared with other countries with very liberal abortion laws. Husbands have a stake in practically every legal decision a wife makes, as a wife has a stake in practically every legal decision a husband makes. The law no longer gives one spouse a veto over the decisions of the other (and a good thing, too), but it does normally make provision to protect the interest of husband and wife in their spouse’s decisions -- except when it comes to abortion.

The question of whether a husband deserves to even be notified when his wife is considering an abortion is back in the news because of the most famous judicial opinion, thus far, of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito. Judge Alito, who sits on the federal appeals court in Philadelphia, was on the panel that heard Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Pennsylvania law had enacted several limitations on abortion, including a provision that husbands needed to be notified. The panel voted 2 – 1 to strike down this part of the law. Judge Alito, in dissent, defended that part of the law. Ultimately, the Supreme Court upheld the appellate court’s decision, and with it, the basic holding of Roe v. Wade.

Adam Liptak, writing in today’s New York Times, has detected a traditional theory of marriage in this and several other decisions of Judge Alito. Marriage, Judge Alito argues in a number of cases, creates a bright line recognized in the law in dozens of ways. In other cases, for example, he argued that when women are granted asylum in this country to escape persecution and forced abortions, their husbands are included in the asylum protection, but their boyfriends are not.

In Western tradition husband and wife become one flesh. Their relation is unique. They are not just partners, and they are certainly not just parties to a business contract. Husbands and wives are uniquely affected by one another’s actions. This applies in every area of life, especially in a decision that goes to the core of what family life is about, as abortion does. Note that the Pennsylvania law did not give husbands a veto over a wife’s abortion decision. It just required that he be notified. The court struck down that part of the law, but if any state considered something like it, they might include a judicial bypass provision in the case of abuse, as there is for the requirement that the parents of minors be notified when their daughter is considering abortion. I think husband notification is not dead as an issue in the abortion discussion.

I think Judge Alito is right, A husband is not just another guy when it comes to his wife’s decisions.

Smart Men Marry Smart Women

Maureen Dowd’s article, “What’s a Modern Girl to Do?” in the current New York Times Magazine laments the post-feminist return of many educated young women to husband-seeking tactics of yore. She wonders if feminism was a hoax, leaving high-achieving women, like Maureen Dowd, with careers and skills that actually scare off husbands, and preclude children.

Dowd cites some of the sociobiological evidence for enduring differences between men and women, especially in how they normally seek a mate. She does not dispute this evidence, but laments it as a fact, and feels betrayed by the decades of social constructivist chimeras of androgyny.

I think Maureen Dowd is giving up too easily. I think it is true that men and women are different in their hardwiring, different in what they seek in a mate, and how they go about that search. But I also know what sociologists know: the normal tendency of a group is not the doom, or fate, or limit on what each individual in that group can do, or will do. Most men and most women prefer a marriage in which he is a little taller, older, smarter, richer, and higher status than she is. This leaves high-achieving women (not to mention older women) in a difficult position, which they lament in, say, the New York Times. Of course, the same process leaves low-achieving men in an equally difficult position, but their troubles rarely find voice in the Times.

Some men do seek the smartest, highest-achieving women. Some men know that looks fade, but brains endure. A smart man, who plans to earn a professional income, can often figure out that marrying a smart woman is likely to get him smarter kids. And two professional incomes means more money than one, or than one career and “girl money.”

Men who seek smart, high-achieving women are not random mutations in the otherwise benighted field of men. Smart, educated people with knowledge-based jobs are a class, often called the knowledge class. They are in a struggle with the old property-owning and –making class. Marriages in the old owning class are based on him trying to earn and own more in order to support her and the children materially. In exchange, she supports him and the children emotionally. Marriages in the knowledge class, on the other hand, are based on husband and wife supporting one another, and their children, in brighter and deeper achievement. Both classes, at their highest levels, exercise real power in the world. Each class makes a serious bid to be the ruling class. Both can produce excellent marriages.

For examples of each kind of marriage, we can think of George and Laura Bush, as compared to Bill and Hillary Clinton.

I don’t know Maureen Dowd’s history or prospects. I do know, though, that there are whole subcultures of men who do not simply judge women by their appearance, but are attracted to brains and accomplishment in a potential wife. Likewise, I know whole subcultures of women who do not judge men simply as “success objects,” to tie themselves to, tie down, and tie up.

Men and women who seek spouses on the basis of brains, ambition, and achievement will have the last laugh.

Good News: Evangelicals Give the Supreme Court a Catholic Majority

Evangelical Methodist George Bush has nominated Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. He joins John Roberts, now Chief Justice, who President Bush had nominated earlier this year. Both are Roman Catholics. If Alito is confirmed, the Supreme Court would have a Catholic majority for the first time ever. The evangelical Protestant wing of the Republican party forced the President to drop the evangelical Protestant (and Catholic convert) Harriet Miers, and instead nominate the way Catholic Alito.

How recently would that have been a fighting issue? In 1960, John F. Kennedy’s mild Catholicism was a major campaign issue among conservative Protestants. Last year, John F. Kerry’s mild Catholicism barely made a ripple. He didn’t even take a majority of the Catholic vote – which proves that there is no “Catholic vote.”

Will the Court Catholics vote as a block? Not very likely. Justice Kennedy and Justice Scalia may be of the same communion, but they don’t share much else.

Which proves the point that Robert Wuthnow argued in The Restructuring of American Religion: the crucial divide in American religion today is no longer between Catholics and Protestants, or Christians and non-Christians, but liberal believers versus conservative believers. Alito’s Catholicism will, no doubt, be relevant in his decisions, in an indirect and constitutionally permissible way. The same is true of Justice Kennedy’s Catholicism, though I think it appears more in cases involving poor people. The same could be said for Justice Ginsburg’s very mild Judaism, and Justice O’Connor’s more robust Episcopalianism, to take just a couple of examples.

The center is well served when old divisions are overcome.