A Culture of Marriage, Two Tales:

Rebuilding One in America

 

Allan Carlson

      Allan Carlson is President of the Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society in Rockford, Illinois. This is the first part of an article on marriage; the second part concerns marriage in Sweden, which will appear in the June issue. This article in reprinted from the newsletter The Family in America, volume 17, number 12. The extensive endnotes in the original have been omitted.

      There is a curious dichotomy in American public life today. On the one hand, those who are able—and in many ways encouraged—to marry are in increasing numbers choosing not to do so. Overall, the U.S. marriage rate has fallen nearly 50 percent since 1960. Meanwhile, what the Census Bureau now calls “unmarried partner households” have climbed in number from 523,000 couples in 1970 to 4,900,000 in 2000: a nine-fold increase. The count of non-family households in America, with neither marriage nor children present, soared from a mere 7 million in 1960 to nearly 33 million in 2000. At the same time, the number of married couple families with children actually declined slightly in absolute numbers, from 25.7 million back in 1960 to 25.2 million in 2000. Such families were one-half of all American households in 1960; today only one-quarter. We also see what sociologist Kingsley Davis calls a “Declining Marital Output;” that is, fewer children. The U.S. Marital Fertility Rate fell from 157 in 1957 to only 84 in 1995: a marked retreat from children. (This Data is from The Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2002, and earlier editions.)

      On the other hand, as we know, there is mounting clamor for access to legal marriage among persons in relationships traditionally denied such treatment. As the “gay rights” organization Lambda Legal explains:

Same-sex couples want to get married for the same . . . reasons as any other couple: they seek security and protection that come from a legal union. . . ; they want the recognition from family, friends and the outside world . . . ; and they seek the structure and support for their emotional and economic bonds that a marriage provides.

      Alas, there are broader legal challenges to the contemporary institution of marriage. A series of recommendations from the American Law Institute, issued a year ago, would strip traditional marriage of most distinctive legal status: not by direct repeal, but rather by extending the protections afforded by marriage to other relationships. The proposals, for example, would grant alimony and property rights to cohabiting domestic partners, both hetero- and homosexual. Moreover, the Law Institute urges that adultery be eliminated as a factor in deciding divorce issues such as alimony, child custody, and the division of property. The number of persons who could claim custody or visitation rights with a child would also expand, to include so-called “defacto parents.”

      Meanwhile, The Alliance for Marriage has put forward in this Congress a proposed Amendment to the U.S. Constitution declaring that “Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman” and prohibiting judges from conferring marital status or benefits on other couples or groups.

      Looking at developments in all Western nations, two European scholars note that legal structures touching on marriage that had been “fairly stable over several centuries have quite suddenly crumbled.” As the authors conclude: “The principles that uncontestedly dominated family law for hundreds of years have been turned topsy-turvy.”

      It is also curious to note that, back in 1926, the new Communist rulers of Soviet Russia shocked the world with a plan to abolish the legal registration of marriage. As one of the measure’s most passionate advocates explained:

Why should the State know who marries whom? Of course, if living together and no registration is taken as the test of a married state, polygamy and polyandry may exist; but the State can’t put up any barriers against this. Free love is the ultimate aim of a socialist state; in that State marriage will be free from any kind of obligation, including economic, and will turn into an absolutely free union of two beings.

      While Communism failed horribly and violently as an economic and political system, its dream of marriage as “free from any kind of obligation, including economic” is actually being achieved in parts of the European Union. There, the label “marriage” survives, but it confers ever-declining status. Social benefits and taxes normally assume that the married couple is actually two individuals. Moreover, a so-called “traditional marriage” of breadwinner husband/homemaking wife actually pays a large financial penalty. As the American Law Institute Report suggests, the legal profession in America now pushes toward the same ends.

      Also strange is the fact that—unlike persons in, say, 1960—we now know, through compelling, irrefutable social science evidence that marriage is good for society, good for adults, and good for children. Books such as Glenn Stanton’s Why Marriage Matters (1997), Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher’s The Case for Marriage (2000), and Bridget Maher’s A Family Portrait (2002) show that traditional marriage is a great and irreplaceable social gift; every good government has a vital interest in encouraging as many traditional marriages as possible.

      In this time of confusion, perhaps it is appropriate to ask the more fundamental question: Just what is marriage? The ancient Greeks had an answer. According to a legend passed on by Plato, there was once a being with both male and female natures who offended the gods and, as punishment, was divided into male and female halves. Ever since, man and woman must find their missing half; when they do, they are rebound in marriage. The Book of Genesis has another answer:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.”. . . Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.”

The 19th Century French writer Louis de Bonald, who helped create modern social science, defined marriage as “a potential society,” becoming “an actual society” only with the birth of the first child: “In a word, the reason for marriage is the production of children.” Compare these content-rich images to that of certain modern sociologists, who describe “the unique character” of marriage as being simply “public approval and recognition”; that is, something, anything, is “marriage” if the “public” says so.

      And so, being a certified member of the “public,” I want to draw on history and offer my own definition of marriage. I will do so through five images:

First: Marriage Is Peculiarly American

      One popular view sees Americans, among the world’s peoples, as specially or uniquely committed to individualism, personal autonomy, and the cultivation of the self. Some analysts argue that this attitude goes back even to the colonial days before the American Revolution.

      More careful history tells a different story. As Colgate University’s Barry Alan Shain reports in The Myth of American Individualism:

It appears that . . . most 18th-century Americans . . . lived voluntarily in morally demanding agricultural communities shaped by reformed-Protestant social and moral norms. These communities were defended by overlapping circles of family- and community-assisted self-regulation and even self-denial.

      Indeed, the evidence suggests that America has long sustained an unusually strong culture of marriage. Ben Franklin saw it, attributing early and nearly universal marriage during the mid-18th Century to America’s abundance of land and opportunity.

      Marriages in America are more general, and more generally early, than in Europe,” he wrote. Twenty years later, the political economist Adam Smith saw it, linking America’s culture of marriage to a thriving economy:

The value of children is the greatest of all encouragements to marriage. We cannot, therefore, wonder that the people in America should generally marry very young.

      Alexis de Tocqueville saw it during his mid-19th century visit to America:

There is certainly no country in the world where the tie of marriage is more respected than in America, or where conjugal happiness is more highly or worthily appreciated.

      American sociologists saw it in the middle of the 20th Century, when the average age for first marriage fell to 20 for women and 22 for men and when 95 percent of adults entered into this culture of marriage.

      How did this American culture of marriage work? Allow me a personal story, one perhaps for the younger folks. My higher education began at a Swedish Lutheran school along the Mississippi River in Illinois: Augustana College. When I arrived there in 1967 as a freshly-scrubbed Freshman, the oft-told moral turmoil of the 1960s had not quite yet reached our campus. Instead, the College President greeted us new students and our parents in an assembly, where he noted jovially: “Look around you. You may be sitting next to your future husband or wife and your future in-laws.” Everyone laughed, but he spoke the truth. The Augustana campus, like most colleges of the era, was the place where one expected to meet one’s future husband or wife. I know I expected to, and I did. The expectation of marriage was in the very air: marriage was assumed to be your next life step; all the cultural and institutional signals pointed that way.

      Today, this assumption and the same signals are not commonly found on American college and university campuses. One prominent exception is Brigham Young University. There, the expectations of early maturity and early marriage still exist: even in the statuary on the campus grounds, which features positive images of motherhood, fatherhood, and home.

      Oddly, America’s culture of marriage also survives in another, much more-unexpected place: Hollywood. What do the following popular films have in common: My Big Fat Greek Wedding; Maid in Manhattan; Sweet Home Alabama; Kate and Leopold; Notting Hill; Runaway Bride; You’ve Got Mail; Pretty Woman; and Sleepless in Seattle? My daughters call them “chick flicks.” A better label might be “marriage flicks,” for all of them cast marriage as the truly fulfilling event in a woman’s—and a man’s—life. None of these films, let alone the whole genre, could have been made in libertine, post-marriage Western Europe. Indeed, a recent report from the Netherlands tells of Jennifer Hoes, a 30-year-old who, standing before a public official, married herself: “We live in a me society,” she explained. The Europeans do not believe in Cinderella anymore; Americans still do. These films are distinctly our own: signs of a still extant cultural yearning for marriage and home.

Second: Marriage Is the Union of the Sexual and the Economic

      This is not my original observation. Rather, this is the classic definition of marriage long used by cultural anthropologists to explain this institution: namely, men and women cooperate economically in order to produce and rear children. According to the great 20th century anthropological surveys, marriage as such is found “in every known human society.” It is certainly true that for thousands of years and for hundreds of generations, humankind organized most economic tasks around the family household.

      Some cast the industrial revolution of the last 150 years as the material source of contemporary challenges to marriage, tearing apart the natural home economy. There is some truth in this analysis. However, some go on to argue that a new family form is now needed: an “egalitarian” family, without role specialization or home production of any sort that would accommodate the industrial impulse. But it will not work. I agree with Kingsley Davis that such an “egalitarian family system”—as dreamed of by the Bolsheviks and as seen today most fully in Western Europe—cannot be sustained. High levels of divorce and cohabitation, combined with low birth rates, actually “raise doubts that societies with this egalitarian system will [even] survive.”

      The necessary alternative is to find new ways of articulating and advancing marriage as an economic partnership. Between 1948 and 1969, for example, the U.S. government did treat marriage as a true partnership for purposes of taxation, allowing married couples to “split their income” like all other legal partnerships. One clear result was “the marriage boom” of that era: a phenomenon that ended only after the elimination of income splitting.

      In addition, calculations from Australia show that the traditional “home economy” has not disappeared at all. Even in advanced industrial societies, the uncounted but real value of continuing home activities such as child care, home carpentry, and food preparation is still at least as large as that of the official economy. Moreover, a growing number of Americans are actively reversing the industrialization of key activities that were once the family’s: this is how we should see home schooling, for example, now embracing over two million American children.

Third: Marriage Is a Fruitful Balance of Burdens and Benefits

      Here, a libertarian perspective offered by Valparaiso University Law Professor Richard Stith, clarifies the issues at stake. He notes that liberals and conservatives alike should agree that state registries of friendships are a bad idea. Indeed, at present, most kinds of friendships are totally unregulated in the U.S. Even before the recent Lawrence v. Texas Supreme Court decision, most states had already decriminalized non-marital sexual relations or no longer enforced prohibitions. This has meant that, for example, the participants in same-sex unions have been as free as anyone else to form long-lasting friendships—and to seal them with promises or binding contracts—all without governmental approval and registration.

      Stith emphasizes that only one category of friendship has faced government registry: those heterosexuals entering legal marriage. But this should not be seen as a liberty or right. Rather, it is primarily a burden. For the most part, marriage legislation limits, rather than increases, individual freedom. Marriage laws commonly mandate the sharing of earnings and debts, compel mutual support, and limit rights to terminate the relationship.|

      Why do modern governments leave most friendships free and unregulated but continue to register and burden these heterosexual unions? Stith replies:

Everyone knows the answer: Sexual relationships between women and men may generate children, beings at once highly vulnerable and essential for the future of every community. . . . Lasting marriage receives public approbation . . . because it helps to produce human beings able to practice ordered liberty.

      Heterosexual unions can create a child at any moment, so the public has a deep interest in their stabilization from the very beginning. In contrast, same-sex unions are “absolutely infertile.” Moreover, the relatively modest benefits adhering to legal marriage and not available through private contract—such as social security provisions—are justified as minimal compensation to those parents, usually women, who make sacrifices such as giving up a career to create and raise children.

Fourth: Marriage Is a Communal Event

      It takes a poet to remind us here that marriage is more than a bond between two people. The Kentuckian Wendell Berry underscores that marriage also exists to bind the couple as “parents to children, families to the community, the community to nature.” The new bride and groom

. . . say their vows to the community as much as to one another, and the community gathers around them to hear and to wish them well, on their behalf and on its own.

The vows bind the lovers “to forebears, to descendants . . . to Heaven and earth.” Even the touch of one married lover to another:

. . . feelingly persuades us what we are: one another’s and many others’ . . . . How strange to think of children yet to come, into whose making we will be made. . .

      Using a favorite metaphor, Berry says that marriage “brings us into the dance that holds the community together and joins it to its place.”

Fifth and Finally: Marriage Is Political

      Here, I mean “political” in the broad sense, as explained by the early 20th Century journalist G. K. Chesterton. He saw the family as an “ancient” institution, one that preexists the state and one that “cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.” This “small state founded on the sexes is at once the most voluntary and the most natural of all self-governing states.” Modern governments seek to isolate individuals from their family, the better to govern them; to divide in order to weaken. But the family is self-renewing, an expression of human nature, which builds on the natural state of marriage. “The ideal for which [marriage] stands in the state is liberty,” Chesterton writes. It stands for liberty because it is

. . . at once necessary and voluntary. It is the only check on the state that is bound to renew itself as eternally as the state, and more naturally than the state.

It creates “a province of liberty” where truth can find refuge from persecution and where the good citizen can survive the bad government.

      In sum, drawing on the lessons of history, I see marriage as especially American, as the union of the sexual and the economic, as a fruitful balance of burdens and benefits, as a communal event, and as political in its essence, the true reservoir of Liberty.     Ω

Shortly after WWII an English member of Parliament, known for his knowledge of history, was asked: “What have you learned from your detailed study of history?” Without batting an eye he replied, “Each time it repeats it gets more expensive!” —source unknown