No weddings and a funeral

Josh Moody | Features | Letter from America

Date posted: 1 Jan 2011

Some remarkable new studies have emerged about the changing patterns of marriage in America.

For decades, it has been assumed that the more educated elites tended towards being more liberal in this and many other ways, while the lower echelons, the less educated with minimal if any college education, are assumed to be more conservative with relation to marriage and anything else.

A strange complexity

For a long time it has been known that this picture has a strange complexity to it: the more educated, while liberal in theory about marriage, actually tend to be pretty conservative about it in their own practice. What’s new, though, is that there is a growing body of evidence that the less educated, whatever their ideological theory, are in practice moving decisively away from long-term marriage commitments. There is more divorce, more out of wedlock birth, less commitment to the institution of marriage.

This is a seismic change to the picture of the American culture wars. In fact, a recent New York Times article¹ suggests that this culture war may not be a battle between the more educated (liberal) and the less educated (conservative), but rather a battle between different kinds of educated people. The article suggests that it may, for instance, a battle between C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman.

That shift alone is truly significant. The caricature in many a movie, pseudo-documentary, religion 101 class at an undergraduate level, and more, is that as you get educated you get less religiously conservative. That may not, for various reasons, actually be the true picture of American society.

Perhaps even more startling — and worrying, whereas the previous perspective is in many ways encouraging — is what this means for the large swathe of less educated Americans. Al Mohler persuasively argues in a blog post² that the single most effective way to wipe out wealth creation for succeeding generations, impoverish current ones, and decrease health, is to cease practising long-term marriage commitment. Yet, for many Americans, at a lower educated level, that seems to be precisely what is happening.

So, while the educated elites debate ‘proposition 8’ (the attempted overthrow of California’s permissiveness with regard to homosexual marriage), the less educated are simply pairing up, breaking up, procreating — but in a far less stable way than in previous generations. And that is a problem that only the gospel can fix.