If sin has been with us since the Fall, it would stand to reason that disordered patterns of marriage and sexuality would be somewhat predictable. Why, then, should Americans in the 21st century be overly concerned about the current decline in marriage? “The scale of marital breakdowns in the West since 1960 has no historical precedent that I know of, and seems unique,” notes retired Princeton University family historian, Lawrence Stone. “There has been nothing like it for the last 2000 years, and probably longer.” It is with no small urgency, then, that this thesis considers marriage, its decline, and the consequences to society. In the pages to follow, marriage will be considered in two respects: 1) freedom, and 2) responsibility. In each case, it will become clear that what was intended to be good and life-giving has been turned to “death” (Romans 6:23) by a few million individual acts of homo incurvatus in se.
Freedom
Benjamin Franklin saw what America was up against from the very beginning: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.” The American people in the early years of the “great experiment” were, unequivocally, virtuous. They “took for granted that marriage was the bedrock institution of society.” To them, virtue and morality were synonymous with “fidelity within marriage” and its ultimate permanence. After returning from his extended American visit, Tocqueville observed that “morals are far more strict there than elsewhere.” Charles Murray parsed these “founding virtues” to four overarching themes: industriousness and honesty (which are virtues unto themselves, and will be touched on later), and marriage and religiosity, “institutions through which right behavior is nurtured.” All who were involved in the creation of these United States understood that “its success depended on virtue in its citizenry.”
‘To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea’ (James Madison). It was chimerical because of the nearly unbridled freedom that the American Constitution allowed the citizens of the new nations. . . . Americans faced few legal restrictions on their freedom of action and no legal obligations to their neighbors except to refrain from harming them. The guides to their behavior at any more subtle level had to come from within.
This “subtle level” of self-monitoring comes down, primarily, to this: how well we handle our freedom when it comes to sexual desire. This is hardly an American challenge. “The balance between sexual expression and restraint” has been wrestled with across time and continents. The average American in the 1700s was no less susceptible to sexual temptation or marital dissatisfaction than the first man and woman or the people who took their vows this morning. These inner struggles are part of our fallen human nature, as first revealed in Genesis 3:7:
The first discovery of our humanity, or better, the discovery that constitutes our humanity, is a discovery about our sexual being. . . . We discover, first, our own permanent incompleteness. We have need for, and are dependent upon, a complementary yet different other, even to realize or satisfy our bodily nature. We learn that sex means that we are halves, not wholes, and worse, that we do not command the missing complementary half. . . . Neither are we internally whole. We are possessed by an unruly or rebellious ‘autonomous’ sexual nature within—one that does not heed our commands (any more than we heeded God’s): we face also within an ungovernable and disobedient element, which embarrasses our claim to self-command. (Leon R. Kass, Man and Woman: An Old Story)
A deep-rooted appreciation for the notion of “complementary halves made whole” seems to be at the heart of the American ideal of marriage. Although women were a long way off from being equal partners under the law, they were, from the very beginning, given the right to choose their own husbands, a departure from the arranged-marriage culture many had fled. Young American girls were then raised and educated so that they might be able to make such an important decision for themselves. The fact that the founding fathers held this freedom of choice so dear reflected their view of the marriage bond as “a covenant.” Marriage, the founders believed, could only be sustained if the couple took their vows knowing they “were perfectly free not to have contracted them.” The early American admiration for the institution was best captured by James Wilson in his Letters on Law:
Whether we consult the soundest deductions of reason, or resort to the best information conveyed to us by history, or listen to the undoubted intelligence communicated in holy writ, we shall find, that to the institution of marriage the true origin of society must be traced. . . . To the institution, more than to any other, have mankind been indebted for the share of peace and harmony which has been distributed among them. “Prima societas in ipso conjugio est,” (“The first bond of society is marriage”) says Cicero in his book of offices: a work which does honor to the human understanding and the human heart.
What happened? How did the nation that started out holding marriage and virtue in such high regard fall so far? Well, for most of the American story, sexual consequences and social mores helped to temper urges to seek pleasure unbridled, and without obligation. This seemed to hold up through the 20th century. In the 1920s, there was a slight foreshadowing of rebellion against Victorian sexual codes and the resulting rise in premarital sex and divorce, but by the 1950s, the pendulum had swung back. “Young people were not taught how to ‘say no,’ they were simply handed wedding rings.” Predictably, the age of first parenthood fell, fertility increased, and the divorce rate dipped from its post-war high. Just as predictably, there was a counter rebellion, only this time there was a new weapon: the birth control pill. The consequences of sex—namely children—had never been easier to prevent, and no longer required the male’s cooperation. As the consequences went, so too went the social mores—individual sin becoming collective sin and creating a social structure through which evil emanates. Parents who had had premarital sex in the 1960s, or fled stale marriages in the 70s, did not want to be hypocritical about sex when rearing their own children. By the 1990s, “4 out of 10 ninth graders—who but a few years ago were more patiently awaiting adulthood—reporting having had intercourse.”
What the “adults” call “recreational sex” the kids soon call “hook-ups,” and the price they pay is anything but casual. “Increasing premarital sexual activity—more sex with more partners—has coincided with increases in sexually transmitted disease, rape, nonmarital pregnancy, cohabitation, and divorce.” Indulgence becomes habitual. Such is the one-way street that is homo incurvatus in se.
Heather Choate Davis 