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Letters and Articles:
"Conjugal Happiness" and the American Way"
by:
Dr. Allan C. Carlson, Ph. D.
On the Special Relationship Between Marriage and the
America Experience
- May 19, 2004
Summary: Alongside affirmation of the integrity
and worth of the individual, the American nation has also been
a land uniquely defined by its commitment to marriage,
understood as the bond of man and woman for procreation and
the rearing of their children. Because of this heritage,
modern attempts to debase the institution of marriage can only
put the nation's political order in grave danger.
The current national crisis over the meaning of marriage,
centered this week in Massachusetts, is something more than
another public debate. The issue of marriage cuts to the very
heart of the American identity, to our self-definition as a
people.
Some may be surprised to hear this. After all, is not
America really a nation of individuals and individualism, of
lifestyle experimentation, of moral innovation, with family
matters of secondary and fading public importance? Or as
contemporary voices ask, does not American democracy stand for
the steady expansion of individual rights--including the
"right to marry"--to ever more categories of people?
As Nathan Glazer explains in his recent book, We Are All
Multiculturalists Now: "If progress is the spread of
equality and liberty, one does not see how any good arguments
can be made against gay and lesbian claims."[1]
This is, I believe, a false reading of American history and
identity. For alongside affirmation of the integrity and worth
of the individual, the American nation has also been a land
uniquely defined, from its origin to the modern era, by its
commitment to marriage, understood as the bond of man and
woman for procreation and the rearing of their children. This
defining trait of American nationhood goes well back into
colonial times.
The Puritans, for example, were not the prudish, loveless
folk so often parodied in our day. Rather, as Edmund Morgan's
classic work, The Puritan Family, explains, these early
Americans saw Christian marriage as the foundation of their
community. This Puritan vision of love "proceeded from
Christian charity," rested on reason and a consciousness
of God's sacred order, and was still "warm and tender and
gracious."
It is true that a Puritan marriage often began with
rational, deliberate choices. Diaries from the time tell of
young men setting out to find "a Woman of Merit--a woman
of Good Temper and prudent Conduct and Conversation,"
someone who might be "a meet yoke fellow." All the
same, true passion also occupied the Puritan mind. John
Winthrop's letters to his wife Margaret commonly ended with
phrases such as "I kiss and love thee with the kindest
affection" and "with the sweetest kisses and pure
embracings of my kindest affection I rest Thine."[2]
Among the Puritans' favorite theo-logians was Thomas Hooker,
who compared the relation of husband and wife to that of
Christ and the believer, and who called the ordinances of the
Church "but the Lord's love letters." Regarding the
husband, Hooker wrote of him as a woman's true soulmate:
The man whose heart is endeared to the woman he loves, he
dreams of her in the night, hath her in his eye...when he
awakes, museth on her as he sits at table, walks with her when
he travels and parties with her in each place where he
comes.... She lies in his Bosom, and his heart trusts in her,
which forceth all to confess, that the stream of his
affection, like a mighty current, runs with full Tide and
strength. Another favorite Puritan theologian, John Cotton, in
a commentary on the Cant-icles, compared the worship of God in
church to the marital love of husband and wife:
[The word delights] is an allusion to the marriage bed,
which is the delights of the Bridegroom, and Bride. This
marriage-bed is the publick [sic] worship of God in the
Congregation of the Church (as Can. 3.1).[3] Alongside such
emotional richness, Puritan marriages were also vital in the
New World, where the respective skills of husband and
wife--their common home economy--were necessary to survival in
the agricultural settlements of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
The same focus on fruitful marriage could be found among
the early backcountry Americans, also known as the
"hillbillies." During the eighteenth century, tens
of thousands of Scots and Ulstermen left the British Isles to
settle on the American frontier, particularly in the hill
country of the Carolinas and Virginia. Adherents to a strict
Calvinism, the Scotch-Irish also carried with them a strong
sense of marriage and family. Writes historian Carl
Bridenbaugh:"The conquest of the [American backcountry]
was achieved by families....The fundamental social unit, the
family, was preserved intact...in a transplanting and
reshuffling of European folkways."[4]
Along with Calvinism, these backcountry Scotch-Irish also
brought from the old country a distinct set of energetic
wedding customs: the mock abduction of brides, often involving
ritualized payments of a "body price" and an "honor
price;" bidden marriages and bridewain; wild feasts
fueled by homemade whiskey, reels, and jigs; the rituals
surrounding the wedding chamber; and "the constant
presence of Black Betty," representing the sexual side of
marriage.
And indeed, these frontier marriages were early and
prolific. In the South Carolina upcountry of the eighteenth
century, women married at the average age of 19; men at age
21. This early marriage was apparently universal, too. In one
Carolina backcountry district with 17,000 inhabitants, there
was not one woman at age 25 who was neither wife nor widow.
And the families were huge: eight, nine, or ten children per
household was the norm. As the Anglican missionary Charles
Woodmason reported in the late eighteenth century:
There's not a cabin but has ten or twelve young people in
it....In many cabins you will see ten or fifteen children and
grandchildren of one size and the mother looking as young as
the daughter.[5] On the frontier's independent farms, marriage
and an abundance of children provided security and made good
economic sense. Faith, custom, and material realities
converged around the wedded estate.
Ben Franklin understood the unique importance of marriage
to America. Europe had little surplus land and was filled with
crowded urban areas, he noted. Adults commonly avoided
marriage until later in life. But in America:
Land being thus Plenty...and so cheap as that a labouring
Man, that understands Husbandry, can in a short Time save
Money enough to purchase a Piece of new Land sufficient for a
Plantation, whereon he may subsist a Family.[6] These farmers
were "not afraid to marry," for they could look
ahead and see that their children, when grown, could be
provided for as well. Franklin concluded:"Hence marriages
in America are more general, and more generally early, than in
Europe."
And such marriages were fertile:eight births to each
marriage in America, Franklin estimated, compared to an
average of four in old Europe. The true "Fathers of their
Nation," Franklin said in reference to the political
leaders of his time, would be "The Cause of the
Generation of Multitudes, by the Encouragement they afford to
Marriage."[7]
Writing in the early 1770s, no less an observer than Adam
Smith saw America's culture of marriage as markedly different
from that of Europe. The Americans' faith in progress and
opportunity, the political economist stressed, found
expression through a strong family life:
The most decisive mark of the prosperity of any country is
the increase in its number of inhabitants....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.[8] In his fine book, The Myth of
American Individualism, historian Barry Shain, looking at the
colonial American period, summarized it thusly:
It appears that...most eighteenth-century Americans cannot
be accurately characterized as predominantly
individualistic....The vast majority of Americans lived
voluntarily in morally demanding agricultural communities
shaped by Reformed Protestant social and moral norms. These
communities were defined by overlapping circles of family--
and community-- assisted self-regulation and even
self-denial.[9] In these family-centered ways, the American
colonies differed from Old Europe. Remarkably, the American
difference in marriage and marital fertility even transcended
the lines of race and slavery. As demographic historian Robert
Wells reports in the journal Population Studies:
With regard to marriage and childbearing, black and white
women in the South were more like each other than like English
women by the second half of the eighteenth century.[10]
America's unique bond to marriage continued into the next, or
nineteenth century. The good home remained the icon of
American self-understanding. That justly famed French observer
of American ways, Alexis de Tocqueville, so testifies.
Visiting here in the late 1820s, Tocqueville found Americans
unusually committed to strong and faithful marriages:
They [Americans] consider marriage as a covenant which is
often onerous, but every condition of which the parties are
strictly bound to fulfil [sic], because they knew all those
conditions beforehand, and were perfectly free not to have
contracted them. The very circumstances which render
matrimonial fidelity more obligatory, also render it more
easy. This observation led Tocqueville to a more sweeping
conclusion:
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....While the
European endeavors to forget his domestic troubles by
agitating society, the American derives from his own home that
love of order which he afterwards carries with him into public
affairs.[11] Note his words here: Tocqueville held that it was
in marriage that Americans crafted the necessary balance
between liberty and order. In any democracy, this is the most
important of political tasks. Unique in the world, it seems,
the nineteenth-century American found the answer in marriage,
which transferred an ordered liberty from the home into public
life. It is not too much to say that, in Tocqueville's view,
the new Republic depended on marriage, rightly understood.
All the same, it is true that in the early years of the
nineteenth century, there had been signs that America was
losing its sustaining virtues. In 1810, church membership and
attendance were low and falling. Per-capita alcohol
consumption soared. And so did the proportion of American
brides already pregnant when coming to the altar, reaching 30
to 40 percent by 1810.[12]
America's Second Great Awakening, a mass religious revival,
came as a response. Tocqueville, we can surmise, caught its
spirit. Between 1810 and 1860, there was a dramatic growth in
religious participation, particularly among teens and young
adults. Formal church membership in America grew explosively,
rising 250 percent during these years. In the new climate of
religious liberty, dozens of denominations now competed for
the allegiance of young members. And while these churches
differed in terms of social class and liturgical style, they
all affirmed that the regulation of individual morality
through marriage and family was a central religious concern.
The results were quite stunning. The proportion of American
women who were pregnant at their marriage actually fell from
about 35 percent in 1810 to 10 percent by 1850. This was not
the result of external laws. Rather, it resulted from a
renewed internal sanctity and the exercise of self control,
and it shows that religious and family revival is both
possible and a recurring part of American history. As
historians Daniel Scott Smith and Michael Hindus explain:
"The sexual revolutionaries of the late eighteenth
century, if the premarital procreators may be so labelled,
were obviously not the vanguard of a sexually liberated
nineteenth century."[13]
Instead, America witnessed the blossoming again of the
Christian home: a new vision captured in the 1869 book, The
American Woman's Home, co-authored by Catharine Beecher and
Harriett Beecher Stowe. These famous sisters described an
ideal house church, which would also serve as a home school,
with a steeple for a chimney and a movable screen that would
turn the parlor into a nave. The marital couple would also
place an organ in their home for hymn sings and samplers on
the walls with favorite Bible verses and Gothic windows
pointing toward heaven. As historian Colleen McDannell
explains, these homes--Protestant and Catholic alike--rested
on pious marriages:
Both the men and women of Victorian America perceived the
sacrality of certain household objects. Women might have made
or purchased the objects--family Bibles, wax crosses, Angelus
clocks--but popular literature often mentioned the objects'
emotional impact on men.[14] And these homes remained strongly
committed to children. Marital fertility remained high until
the end of the nineteenth century, particularly in the
southern and prairie states. Images of the good home, the good
marriage, and the primary commitment to children filled the
new magazines that characterized the Victorian Age in America.
As the twentieth century dawned, the importance of marriage
to American life found reaffirmation. That great advocate for
distinctive American values, Theodore Roosevelt, stressed that
in American civilization, marriage was "the most
fundamental, the most important of all relations." He
continued:
[I]n all the world there is no better and healthier home
life, no finer factory of individual character, nothing more
representative of what is best and most characteristic in
American life, than that which exists in the higher type of
family; and this higher type of family is to be found
everywhere among us.[15] For Americans, he wrote:
The primary work of the average man and the average
woman--and of all exceptional men and women whose lives are to
be really full and happy--must be the great primal work of
home-making and home-keeping.[16] The good marriage, Roosevelt
emphasized, would be "a partnership of the soul, the
spirit, and the mind, no less than of the body." The
"highest ideal" of the American family could be
achieved "only where the father and mother stand to each
other as lovers and friends," and where "the
partnership of happiness" would also be "a
partnership of work."[17]
This emphasis on marriage and the good home as defining
American traits also surfaced as political and cultural
leaders faced the challenge of mass immigration in the first
two decades of the twentieth century. More than a million new
immigrants arrived each year. Compared to the existing
population, this was almost three times the flow recorded in
the 1990s. Most of these newcomers did not speak English, nor
did they practice the Protestant faith, both of which had been
American norms. How could they be assimilated into American
life?
The answer, leading advocates concluded, was through a
shared devotion to marriage and family. The common denominator
of American identity would be found in building the
married-couple home, with husbands/fathers seen as
breadwinners and homebuilders and wives/mothers seen as
homemakers. As Frances Kellor, Director of Americanization
Work for the Federal Bureau of Education, explained in 1918:
If we start with [marriage and] the family and work upward,
we get a sound city that will stand the strain of any crisis
because its weakest links are strong. Every great strain and
burden eventually rests upon the family....Approached from the
neighborhood and family and met squarely, the problem of
Americanization can be solved adequately.[18] This work took
concrete form in "Little Mothers Leagues" and the
"Baby Saving" campaign organized by the U.S.
Children's Bureau in immigrant communities and through the
"home economics" teachers funded by the federal
Smith-Lever Act of 1917.
However, these "American values" centered on
marriage, home, and family once again showed signs of discord
during the 1920s. A rebellion against supposed
"repressive" sexual values set in. Religion seemed
to be losing its influences on American family life,
symbolized by the ridicule heaped on the great evangelical
lawyer and politician William Jennings Bryan during the Scopes
"Monkey" Trial. The "flapper" captured the
youthful rebellion against supposed domestic constraints:
short skirts, short hair, cigarettes, no marriage, no
children. Indeed, the marriage rate tumbled to an historic
American low. The total fertility rate among Americans fell
from an average of nearly four children born per woman in 1890
to only two by 1933, which was, for the first time in American
history, a figure below the generation replacement rate.
And yet, something extraordinary began to happen in the
1930s. In these years just before World War II, American
marriage and fertility rates started to rise. Church
membership rolls also began climbing again; indeed, by 1950,
nearly half of Americans were attending church or synagogue on
any given weekend, a significant increase over the 1930
figure. Moreover, the Protestant churches began once more to
show a family-oriented spirit. Back in 1931, the Federal
Council of Churches--representing the so-called Protestant
mainline--had broken faith with over a thousand years of
Christian consensus and had endorsed family limitation through
birth control. In 1946, though, the FCC argued instead that
"[f]or the individual family, there is nothing more
satisfying, even though it may involve real sacrifice, than to
have at least three or four children."[19]
Evangelicals re-entered the public square in these years.
In 1949, the young preacher Billy Graham launched a three-week
crusade in Los Angeles. With the huge tent overflowing every
night, the event extended to nine weeks, and captured national
attention.
The American marriage rate soared between 1932 and 1968,
recreating a culture of marriage. Just as during the
eighteenth century, marriage came early and became nearly
universal. And, just as in the nineteenth century, a
"liberated" sexuality was reigned in by religiously
motivated self-control and by the married state. The average
age for first marriage fell to 20 for women and 22 for men,
very close to the astonishing numbers found among the Carolina
backwoodsmen of 1750.
THE MID-CENTURY "MARRIAGE BOOM" Year Marriage
Rate* % Above Base Year (1932)
1932 56.0 0%
1936 74.0 + 32%
1940 82.8 + 48%
1944 76.5 + 37%
1948 98.5 + 76%
1952 83.2 + 49%
1956 82.4 + 47%
1960 73.5 + 31%
1964 74.6 +33%
1968 79.1 +41%
1970 76.5 +37%
1976 65.2 +16%
1982 61.4 +10%
1986 56.2 +1%
1990 54.5 -3%
1996 49.7 -9%
*Marriages per 1000 Unmarried Women, 15 years and older
This chart shows the mid-century American "marriage
boom," from a low in 1932, which is used as the base
here, to a peak in the late 1940s, showing strength as late as
1970, finally disappearing only in the 1980s. By the early
1960s, over 95 percent of American women had married before
age forty. The American birthrate also climbed, from a total
fertility rate of 2 children per woman in 1933 to 3.8 in
1957--an increase of 90 percent in less than 25 years.
Protestant Sunday schools were swarming with children again,
and the greatest era of new church construction in American
history commenced in the child-rich suburbs.
The deeper revolution, though, may have been among American
Catholics, an example with a lesson for us all. Indeed, one
might actually see the American "Marriage Boom" and
the more famous "Baby Boom" as, statistically
speaking, primarily "Catholic things," symbolized
here by the Robert Kennedy family of that era. For example, in
a survey conducted during the early 1950s, only ten percent of
Catholics under age 40 had four or more children, very close
to the nine percent found among Protestants. By the late
1950s--a mere six years later--the Protestant figure was still
nine percent, but the number of large Catholic families had
more than doubled to 22 percent.[20]
More surprisingly, this surge in Catholic family creation
in married-couple homes was most pronounced among Catholic
women who had attended college, a development confounding a
supposed law of sociology. The commitment to large families
was also concentrated among younger believers. Through 1965,
each new age cohort of young Catholics was more pro-natalist
than the group before. In addition, more frequent attendance
at Mass was related to early marriage and high fertility.
Why did this happen? Part of the answer lies, I believe,
with a then-unified Teaching Church which--from the Pope on
down--focused on the holiness of family creation. As Pope Pius
XII told an audience in 1958, "Large families are most
blessed by God and specially loved and prized by the church as
its most precious treasures."[21] Part of the answer also
lies with the new opportunities for early marriage and family
creation that came as young Catholics poured out of urban
ethnic ghettoes for the new homes on spacious lots in the
burgeoning suburbs: a process that Benjamin Franklin had
himself anticipated two hundred years earlier.
Another part of the answer is that public policy
intentionally and strongly reinforced marriage and
childbearing in these years. American conservatives commonly
heap abuse on Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Relative to
strictly economic questions, this may be fair. However, a
close examination of this program shows that its social goals,
at least, were to encourage more, earlier, and stronger
marriages. Every major New Deal program--from the National
Industrial Recovery Act to the Works Progress Administration
to the Social Security Amendments of 1939--each openly aimed
to build traditional marriages and homes, resting on
"breadwinning" husbands and "homemaking"
wives. As one architect of the domestic New Deal, Molly Dewson,
explained in arguing for homemakers' and survivors' benefits
in Social Security:
[W]hen you begin to help the family to attain some security
you are at the same time beginning to erect a National
structure for the same purpose. Through the well-being of the
family, we create the well-being of The Nation. Through our
constructive contribution to the one, we help the other to
flourish.[22] Housing policy, also redesigned in the 1930s,
created mechanisms to provide subsidized Federal Housing
Administration loans to young couples, which in turn
encouraged early marriage and childbearing. During the 1940s,
the U.S. Congress also redesigned the federal tax code,
introducing the marriage-friendly concept of "income
splitting" and substantially increasing the value of the
personal exemption. These measures turned marriage, children,
and an at-home parent (usually the mother) into valuable
"tax shelters" for the average taxpaying household.
In sum, religious renewal, America's abundance of
opportunity, and intentionally pro-family public policy proved
to be a powerful and successful combination, together renewing
the nation. Ordered liberty, resting on marriage, had found
new expression.
Economic historian (and, later, National Security Advisor)
Walt W. Rostow underscored the importance of this social
renewal to American foreign policy in his 1957 essay "The
American Style." The nation now confronted the worldwide
task of facing down Communism, an immense challenge. And yet,
Rostow drew hope from--of all things--"the birth rate
increase" witnessed since the 1930s. Compared to old
Europe, the American style also included "a narrower but
perhaps more intense family," "earlier
marriages,...more children," and strong churches and
voluntary associations, which worked "to ramify and to
weave a highly individualistic and mobile population into a
firm social fabric."[23] Much like de Tocqueville, Rostow
saw this nation's commitment to marriage and family as vital
to the success of American democracy. As he wrote in the
official U.S. "Basic National Security Policy"
report for 1962:
The success of the whole [anti-Communist] doctrine and
strategy developed in this paper depends on the capacity of
the U.S. to sustain a performance at home which reaches deeply
into our domestic arrangements and which requires
widespread...assumption of responsibility and sacrifice for
public purposes by our people."[24] Without such
grounding in a nation of decent and child-centered homes,
Rostow believed, American national security policy would
stumble and fail. And so it happened in the decade after 1965.
Indeed, starting in that portentous year, a culture-wide
attack on the institution of marriage began. Neo-Malthusians
seeking population control, feminists seeking a
"liberation" from traditional home life, sexual
revolutionaries striving to tear down religious guides and
restraints, and socialists seeking to eliminate all
institutions standing between the individual and the state all
shared an interest in destroying this latest iteration of
America's unique culture of marriage. Between 1965 and 1980,
they largely had their way. As the Playboy Press, in its
"Official History of the Sex Revolution," boasted as
early as 1973:
Legions of Lolitas joined the battle [against American
values]....Manners and morals and great institutions bit the
dust....And when the air was cleared...the world was never
going to be the same again. No one knew exactly how, but
Western Civilization had been caught with its pants down.
Appropriately, this book's title was Rape of the A*P*E* (APE
here meaning the American Puritan Ethic). A subtitle--The
Obscening of America--underscored the intentional nature of
the enterprise, led by men "dirty-minded beyond
belief." The Playboy Press concluded that this revolution
had "removed America's backbone" and had revealed
our nation's terrible secret: "Stripped of the Puritan
ethic, we have no morals at all....[N]othing was reduced to
less recognizable rubble than the revered Institution of
Marriage."[25]
So sayeth the Playboy Press.
Well, if Benjamin Franklin, Adam Smith, Alexis de
Tocqueville, and Theodore Roosevelt were all correct regarding
the special place of marriage in the building of the American
Republic, then the Playboy Press is equally correct in
underscoring how the assault on traditional marriage launched
in the 1960s and '70s was also an assault on the very
foundation of our Republic: "the revered Institution of
Marriage." The changes might be summarized through the
following numbers, comparing 1957--the height of the
mid-twentieth-century "marriage boom"--to the year
2000:
1957 2000
Marriage Rate (a) 82.4 47.2 Percentage of Adult Males
Married 76.6 61.5 Median Age at First Marriage (for women)
20.3 26.0 Married Couple Households, as a Percent of All
Households 76% 53% Marital Fertility Rate (b) 161.4 92.9 a =
Marriages per 1000 unmarried women per year, ages 15 and older
b = Births per 1000 married women, ages 18 to 44.
Here we see a sharp decline in the marriage rate (about 43
percent), a retreat from marriage among both men and women,
the near disappearance of early marriage, the weakening of the
married-couple home as the normative American lifestyle, and a
sharp fall in what one analyst calls "the marital
product"--that is, children.
And not by coincidence, these were also the years of
American retreat from the world, symbolized by the Iranian
hostage crisis and the fall of Saigon to communism.
However, despite claims of victory by the sexual left, and
despite even the scenes from Massachusetts this week, a
"culture of marriage" still survives in America. We
can, for example, find it among certain religious groups. The
Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), for example, is the largest
Protestant body in America, with 16 million members. Its 1998
resolution on "the family" scandalized progressive
opinion. The SBC measure stated that "God has ordained
the family as the foundational institution of human
society," that "marriage is the uniting of one man
and one woman in covenant commitment for a lifetime,"
and, more controversially, that:
A husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the church.
He has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect
and to lead his family. A wife is to submit herself graciously
to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church
willingly submits to the headship of Christ. She...has the
God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve
as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next
generation. Recent data also shows that conservative
Protestants who attend church weekly have stronger marriages
and more children than the national average. Some have even
suggested that we may be on the cusp of, or already engaged
in, another Great Awak-ening, where America's reservoir of
religious belief might refresh our culture again.
Meanwhile, another religious group, The Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-Day Saints--the Mormons--have also shown a
strong defiance of the spirit of the age and have nourished
their own culture of marriage. LDS leaders issued their
Proclamation on the Family in 1995, declaring that:
The first commandment that God gave to Adam and Eve
pertained to their potential parenthood as husband and wife.
We declare that God's commandment for his children to multiply
and replenish the earth remains in force....The family is
ordained of God. Marriage between man and woman is essential
to His eternal plan. Children are entitled to birth within the
bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother
who honor marital vows with complete fidelity. Brigham Young
University, now the nation's largest independent institution
of higher learning, expresses this spirit. Expectations of
early marriage and family creation are part of the campus
atmosphere, physically expressed by the campus statuary, which
features positive images of motherhood, fatherhood, children,
and home. In Utah, where LDS members constitute about 70
percent of the population, marital fertility rose between 1987
and 2000 to a figure nearly fifty percent above the U.S.
average.
And America's culture of marriage survives in another, most
unexpected place:Hollywood. What do the films Sleepless in
Seattle, Pretty Woman, Runaway Bride, You've Got Mail, Kate
and Leopold, Sweet Home Alabama, Maid in Manhattan, Notting
Hill, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and Thirteen Going on Thirty
have in common?
No, it's not a Julia Roberts/Meg Ryan film festival. My
daughters call such films "chick flicks." But a
better label might be "marriage flicks," for all of
them cast marriage as the great, satisfying, and truly
fulfilling event in a woman's life, and in a man's life as
well. None of these films, let alone the whole genre, could
have been made in cynical, libertine, post-marriage Old
Europe. Twenty-first-century Europeans do not believe in
Cinderella anymore; Americans still do, despite the battering
that marriage has taken in recent decades. These films are
distinctly our own:signs of a still-extant cultural yearning
for marriage and home.
I tell this story to underscore the profoundly radical and
destructive nature of the assault on marriage, now mounted
under the labels, "freedom to marry" and "gay
rights." These movements are not attempts to fulfill the
promise of America. Rather, they seek to undermine the very
self-understanding of this nation, our identity as a people.
For you see, traditional, natural marriage forms the true
American Way. As Tocqueville found, marriage is necessary to,
or the source of, the unique balance between liberty and order
that has defined and sustained our Republic. It is a critical
part of our unwritten constitution. To tinker with marriage
for ideological ends is to place the nation's political order
at grave risk.
And I also underscore my belief that America still has the
religious and cultural reserves necessary to restore a culture
of marriage, provided that public policy once again affirms
and supports this traditional institution. Our history offers
earlier examples of renewal: the first half of the nineteenth
century; and the middle decades of the twentieth century. A
third Awakening is open to us, if religious leaders and
political leaders perform their respective tasks with vision
and courage.
END NOTES 1. Nathan Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists
Now (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997): 18. 2.
Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic
Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England (New York: Harper
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