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America’s Marriage Debate Depends on Civil Society

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 00:01:00 -0400

As recent events in New York show, the marriage debate in America takes place amid serious political and legal fault lines. But efforts to defend and strengthen this bedrock institution ultimately depend on how marriage is understood, articulated, and practiced in civil society.

As an undergraduate at Duke University, I spent the better part of senior year preparing for two related challenges: my senior thesis and marriage. My thesis, written for the public policy department, focused on the effects of marriage and divorce law.

While I was writing it, my soon-to-be fiancée and I were going through pre-engagement counseling with our pastor. A month before graduation, I submitted the thesis for Duke’s approval and popped the question to Karin.

Thankfully, both said yes.

Since those days, social scientists have mounted more and more research confirming the substantial social and economic effects of marriage and divorce. Studies show that a healthy marriage is associated with higher income, home ownership, and accumulation of assets and savings.

Strong marriage also correlates with positive outcomes for children , including higher academic achievement; improved mental and emotional health; lower risk of substance abuse and violent delinquency; and delayed sexual activity and risk behavior. Being raised by married parents reduces a child’s probability of living in poverty by about 80 percent. And according to a joint report from the Institute for American Values and several other organizations, family fragmentation costs U.S. taxpayers at least $112 billion each year.

On these social and economic grounds alone, government has a significant interest in safeguarding, respecting, and protecting traditional marriage. In his new paper, “A Marshall Plan for Marriage,” Heritage Foundation Senior Fellow Chuck Donovan outlines how federal and state officials could do just that.

Such policy recommendations send important signals about the significance of marriage for the welfare of society. But when it comes to strengthening marriage, government can do only so much.

Marriage, after all, is a pre-political institution. It wasn’t created by civil government, and doesn’t depend on civil government for its existence. Marriage is a relationship that deserves the protection of government, but the current debate is about much more than the public benefits and legal definition of marriage.

At its heart, the marriage debate in America is about the meaning of a certain relationship. This is a conversation about the purposes of a particular kind of commitment and how our most basic views about the meaning and purpose of love, sex, and marriage are formed in civil society”by what we observe from our parents growing up, what’s discussed around the dinner table, what’s heard and practiced in our places of worship.

Any hope of strengthening marriage and reducing the prevalence of divorce and out-of-wedlock births must rely on institutions such as the family and church. These are the kind of institutions that are well equipped to form habits, shape opinions, mold desires, cultivate healthy relationships, and exercise moral authority. Pastors and church leaders, especially, wield great influence in shaping parishioners’ understandings of and expectations for marriage. Premarital counseling likely is where they encounter the most pointed instruction. This was true for Karin and me in the months before our engagement and marriage.

Unfortunately, only 25 percent to 33 percent of marrying couples receive premarital counseling. Although a majority of clergy rank premarital counseling as high in importance, couples often don’t leave enough time before the wedding date to go to more than three one-hour counseling sessions.

This is one reason why, in the attempt to strengthen marriage in America, the nonprofit organization Marriage Savers focuses primarily on pastors and the way they prepare members of their congregations for marriage. Since 1986, Marriage Savers has helped more than 200 churches form Community Marriage Policies. Participating pastors pledge to recruit and sustain “mentor couples” within their congregations. The pastors also agree to refuse to marry any couple who hasn’t had significant premarital preparation from both clergy and a mentor couple. The results are impressive: Churches with Community Marriage Policies have seen reduced divorce rates and improved marital relationships.

By strengthening marriage, private counseling sessions significantly contribute to the common good. Successful community-based efforts such as Marriage Savers not only shape hearts, minds, and relationships, but also help provide spouses and their children with a buffer against poverty or other social ills.

Policymakers need to understand the public good of traditional marriage. They need to work to protect and encourage it in law. Winning the public debate over the meaning of marriage, however, also requires the effective engagement of civil society.

Before Karin and I married, my research on the negative economic and social effects of divorce sobered me. But even more effective was the positive instruction about successful marriage that we received in pastoral counseling before we got engaged. We learned not only the purposes of marriage, but also how to create a budget, communicate effectively, and avoid personal insults when arguing. Just as important as public efforts to fight for marriage may be the need to train couples to fight well within it.

Ryan Messmore, D.Phil., is the William E. Simon fellow in religion and a free society at The Heritage Foundation .

RESOURCES

FamilyFacts.org

Robert Rector, Marriage: America’s Greatest Weapon Against Child Poverty

The Taxpayer Costs of Divorce and Unwed Childbearing [PDF]

A Marshall Plan for Marriage: Rebuilding Our Shattered Homes

Catherine Latimer and Michael J. McManus, How to Give Marriage Insurance to Premarital Couples

J. Robin Summers and Jo Lynn Cunningham, Premarital Counseling by Clergy: a Key Link Between Church and Family [PDF]

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Rejoicing in Justice Done

Tue, 03 May 2011 15:13:48 -0400

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Real Social Justice

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 00:01:00 -0500

This week marks the birthday of a man most folks have never heard of, although he coined one of today’s most ubiquitous phrases: Social Justice. Born in 1793, Luigi Taparelli D’Azeglio was an Italian Jesuit scholar who co-founded the theological journal Civilt Cattolica and served as rector of the seminary Collegio Romano.

Taparelli wrote frequently about social problems arising from the Industrial Revolution, and his influence was significant. Pope Leo XIII’s social encyclical Rerum Novarum , published in 1891, drew on insights from his former teacher, Taparelli.

Today, political activists often use the phrase “social justice” to justify government redistribution of wealth. In the mid-1800s, however, Taparelli prefaced “justice” with “social” to emphasize the social nature of human beings and, flowing from this, the importance of various social spheres outside civic government. For Taparelli, these two factors were essential in formulating a just approach to helping those in need.

He understood that human beings naturally join together in groups. “The social fact, considered at its maximum generality, presented us subjects as intelligent beings and human society as men, that is to say made of intelligence and sense,” Taparelli says, and because of his intelligence and sense, men are able to share common ideas which produces a “unity of will” to achieve various ends and this is “the essential idea of society.” Some of these societies, however, are more natural and intimate than others. We come together not just in cities and states, but first and most importantly in families, neighborhoods, religious bodies, clubs (or, in his day, guilds) and a variety of informal organizations. Through these natural associations, people strive to meet the basic goals and goods of life.

Taparelli believed that people have the right to freely form different levels of association and to interact through them to fulfill needs and accomplish necessary tasks. Each of these social spheres, institutions, or consortia has its own proper identity and purpose. According to Taparelli, “every consortium must conserve its own unity in such a way as to not lose the unity of the larger whole,” but at the same time “every higher society must provide for the unity of the larger whole without destroying the unity of the consortia.”

Indeed, he understood that a just society depends on these different forms of association each being able to do what they do best. He not only insisted on freedom for these various spheres, but especially for those closest to the ground: the associations that because people are most directly involved in them, encourage personal relationships and local responsibility.

His vision of social justice, then, emphasized freedom and respect for human beings and the small institutions through which they pursue basic needs. He held that true justice can’t be achieved without doing justice to our social nature and natural forms of association. Social justice entailed a social order in which government doesn’t overrun or crowd out institutions of civil society such as family, church and local organizations. Rather, they are respected, protected, and allowed to flourish.

Today, well-meaning policy makers and activists often do just the opposite as they try to overcome social challenges. Rather than viewing society as a network of smaller associations and communities, they mistakenly equate society with the state, centering its identity upon civic government.

As a result, these policy makers and activists conceive justice in terms of how much government directly addresses the needs of individuals. They too often bypass the web of intermediary institutions or deem those institutions irrelevant”or detrimental”in addressing and solving large social problems.

Take poverty, for example. Today, many of those who pursue “social justice” for the poor simply call for more government spending on welfare programs. Yet federal welfare programs continue to discourage marriage and work”the two most important factors for escaping poverty, as much research shows.

The kind of aid to the poor that does justice to the social nature of human beings and our basic social institutions seeks to strengthen rather than weaken marriage and family. And it makes gainful employment more possible.

Americans live in a different time and place than Luigi Taparelli, but we face many of the same challenges he faced. His outlook was shaped by the Italian unification movement; he witnessed the drive toward government centralization at home and throughout Europe. He fought resulting threats to local administrative structures, and he defended local guilds and charitable associations against inappropriate government interference.

We also live amid increased calls for the state to meet people’s needs. We ought to heed Taparelli’s warning about the tendency of centralized government to push local organizations from roles of public relevance: “Deprecating or weakening the inferior is to deprecate and weaken even the superior.” When we ignore, crowd out, or weaken nongovernmental institutions in the name of social justice, we hurt not only those institutions but the larger society as well. Those hit hardest, too often, are the very people Taparelli desired to help.

Ryan Messmore is the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and a Free Society at the Heritage Foundation , which produced the Seek Social Justice small group study. The quotations are taken from Thomas Behr’s Luigi Taparelli D’Azeglio (1793“1862) and the Development of Scholastic Natural-Law Thought As a Science of Society and Politics

RESOURCES:

Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum .
Ryan Messmore’s Speaking of Social Justice .
Jeff Kemp, et al., Hope, Growth, and Enterprise: Social Justice Lessons from the Life of Jack Kemp .
Michael Novak’s Defining Social Justice .
Stefano Solari and Daniele Corrado’s Social Justice: A Controversial Concept .

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