….Society is breaking at both the local and national level, precipitated, to a large extent, by the dramatic rise in single, white mothers. Correlating three national longitudinal studies, Murray reveals this statistic about children whose mothers turned forty between 1997 and 2004: In Belmont, 90% still lived with both biological parents; in Fishtown, it was less than 30%. “The absolute level is so low that it calls into question the viability of white working-class communities as a place for socializing the next generation.” Some might argue that many of these unmarried women are, in fact, living with the biological father, or perhaps, another caring man so the children are just fine. The research does not support this claim. The disadvantages of being born to cohabiting parents extend into childhood and adolescence, even when the cohabiting couple stills consists of the two biological parents . . . the outcomes were rarely better than those for children living with a single parent or in a ‘cohabiting stepparent’ family. (Charles Murray, Coming Apart)
The reasons for this are myriad: married couples tend to become more religiously involved after marriage while cohabitating couples become less so, extended families support and invest in married couples and their children far more than they do for unmarried couples, schools and courts take far more seriously the role of legal father and husband than they do the sway of “mom’s boyfriend.” But perhaps the greatest reason is that “married partners tend to enhance their productivity by developing specialized skills; cohabiting partners more often do everything for themselves (being less sure of the partner’s sticking around.) This helps account for the marriage premium— men’s greater earning if married.” (David G. Myers, The American Paradox)
Although many might not be aware of these specific statistics or the severity of them, America knows that there’s a problem. An overwhelming majority (69%) of Americans say that “the trend toward more single women having children without a male partner to help raise them is a bad thing for society,” and 61% that a child needs “both a mother and a father to grow up happily.” Those who insist that the disadvantages of being born into the lower class are just too great to overcome may not be aware that the odds of building a better future are—even now—very much on their side. They simply have to make good on three highly manageable goals: 1) graduate from high school, 2) get a job, and 3) get married and wait until they’re 21 before having a baby. If they manage that, according to Brookings economists Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill, “they have an almost 75% chance of making it into the middle class.” Still, few are willing or able to reassert the obvious: that having kids outside of marriage is bad for the kids, bad for parents, and bad for the community. “Today, to suggest that a change might be in order, starting with a healthy drop in self-absorption, is anathema: it’s a free country, and don’t lay your values on my self-respect.”
So where are the men in all this? Their increasingly marginalized role may be the most dangerous thing to American society of all. Again, we must look at education, and the role it plays in both marriage and responsibility. We will also consider one of Murray’s founding virtues—industriousness—as it pertains to the men of Fishtown. One of the great virtues of America is that it did not have “different codes for socioeconomic classes.” Young men of all backgrounds were raised in the Judeo-Christian codes of conduct exemplified in the classic McGuffey Readers, which taught America’s children who and what they were and how they were expected to behave. Even when these civic training guides were phased out, their lessons endured, so that a man growing up in the 1940s, 50s, and even early 60s, could be expected to hold this view of the code for males:
To be a man means that you are brave, loyal, and true. When you are in the wrong, you own up and take your punishment. You don’t take advantage of women. As a husband, you support and protect your wife and children. You are gracious in victory and a good sport in defeat. Your word is you bond. Your handshake is as good as your word. It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. When the ship goes down, you put the women and children into the lifeboats and wave good-bye with a smile.
Up through the 1980s, changes in Fishtown’s “male dropout from the labor force moved roughly in tandem with the national unemployment rate.” But between 1985 and 2005, something changed:
Men who had not completed high school increased their leisure time by eight hours per week, while men who had completed college decreased their leisure time by six hours per week. . . . In 2003-5, men who were not employed spent less time on job search, education, and training, and doing useful things around the house than they had in 1985. They spent less time on civic and religious activities. They didn’t even spend their leisure time on active pastimes such as exercise, sports, hobbies, or reading … How did they spend that extra leisure time? Sleeping and watching television. (Murray)
This sleeping and TV watching is, no doubt, related to an increase in drug and alcohol use. “With the economy—the factories all gone—and the poverty, you can get sucked into drugs real easy.” Entertainment imitates life. In the past five years, movies such as Ted, The 40-Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and Pineapple Express depict the new prototypical American male: hanging out on the couch with his buddies well into his 30s, playing video games, dodging serious relationships, and getting stoned. This makes women—often the mothers of their children—less inclined to want them as spouses, which, in turn, may keep them from maturing. Homo incurvatus in se is a vicious cycle. “Married men become more productive after they are married because they are married.” Men who marry are also less likely to suffer from depression, and those who do suffer in their bachelorhood will find that marriage “mitigates against moroseness.” In his book Sexual Suicide, George Gilder claimed that “unmarried males arriving at adulthood are barbarians who are then civilized by women through marriage.” He predicted that because of this, the decline in marriage in America would be disastrous. Many derided his claim as “patriarchal sexism,” but Murray contends that its underlying assertions ring true: “The responsibilities of marriage induce young men to settle down, focus, and get to work.” In Murray’s 21st-century Fishtown, over 30% of white males ages 30-49 are considered economically ineffectual. In other words, even by the lowest measure—keeping themselves and one other adult above the poverty line—they are failing.
This failure is felt and shared by not only the people of Fishtown, but by all of America who will wrestle with how to keep the unemployed afloat, how to absorb the increase in mental illness, violence, drug abuse, and crime that is triggered by this new generation of ineffectual men and overburdened women, and how to sustain the promise of “equality” in America when circumstances have grown so far from equal. There had been a time when young men and women of all social classes would be overwhelmed with desire and yield. If a child were conceived, the next step was clear—or if it were not, society would make it clear. Once we realized how easy it could be to have pleasure without responsibility, our sinful natures had a field day, heaping lie upon lie (you don’t need a man to have a baby, a marriage license is just a piece of paper, marriage is old-fashioned, the kids are just fine), until we fall victim to what Luther noted five-hundred years ago: “Curvedness is now natural for us, a natural wickedness and a natural sinfulness. Thus man has no help from his natural powers, but he needs the aid of some power outside of himself. This is love.”
The love of which Luther speaks can only be found in God. So although we don’t need God to make a case for the importance of marriage to society, we cannot be saved from the sin that has led to its decline without Him. The one who created us, redeems us, and sanctifies us is our only hope against homo incurvatus in se and the resurrection of the institution of marriage.
From RECLAIMING THE WISDOM OF HOMO INCURVATUS IN SE: “MAN TURNED IN ON HIMSELF” AS AN ENTRY POINT FOR THE DISCUSSION OF SIN IN 21ST-CENTURY AMERICA by Heather Choate Davis
Responsibility
Despite our determination to separate pleasure from duty, it remains an inescapable fact of our anatomy: sex leads to babies and the responsibilities of child rearing. Just as sin has led us to make an end run around marriage, so, too, we have sought to avoid the responsibility intended to go hand in hand with sexual pleasure. Birth control—which is used by 62% of all U.S. woman of reproductive age —and abortion are common options. Although it is encouraging to note that abortion rates in the U.S. are now at an historically low 18% of all pregnancies, this still represents 227 aborted lives per every 1000 live births. But, for the purposes of this brief section, the complex social and theological issues of birth control and abortion will not be addressed. Rather, responsibility will be considered as it pertains to those who have children, the impact that unmarried mothers are having on society, and the very problematic statistic that, increasingly, they are uneducated and white. Much of this insight comes from the 2012 book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, in which Charles Murray analyzes demographic data based not on the whole of the nation, but on its majority race.
For decades now, trends in American life have been presented in terms of race and ethnicity, with non-Latino whites (hereafter, just whites) serving as the reference point—the black poverty rate compared to the white poverty rate, the percentage of Latinos who go to college compared to the percentage of whites who go to college. . . . This strategy has distracted our attention from the way that the reference point is changing. . . . And so this book uses evidence based overwhelmingly on whites in . . . the new upper class [and] the new lower class. . . . My message: don’t kid yourselves that we are looking at stresses that can be remedied by attacking the legacy of racism or by restricting immigration. The trends I describe exist independently of ethnic heritage. (Charles Murray, 12)
To synthesize and give narrative to the data, Murray comes us with two prototypical towns: Belmont, which represents the new upper-class—also know as “the cognitive elite”—in which 63% have BAs and the median family income in 2000 was $124,200, and Fishtown, which represents the growing lower class—a town in which some will finish high school, get GEDs, go to community college for a year or so, but most will work in both high and low-skill blue collar jobs, and only “8% of the adults” have college degrees. We will use Murray’s depictions of upscale Belmont and lower-class Fishtown to show how “over the last half century, marriage has become the fault line dividing American classes.” That fault line is leading with frightening speed to the “fracturing of human society” in America.
Trends in marriage are important not just with regard to the organization of communities, but because they are associated with large effects on the socialization of the next generation. No matter what the outcome being examined—the quality of mother-infant relationship, externalizing behavior in childhood (aggression, delinquency, and hyperactivity), delinquency in adolescence, criminality as adults, illness and injury in childhood, early mortality, sexual decision making in adolescence, school problems and dropping out, emotional health, or any other measure of how well or poorly children do in life—the family structure that produces the best outcomes for children, on average, are two biological parents who remain married. Divorced parents produce the next-best outcomes. Whether the parents remarry or remain single while the children are growing up makes little difference. Never-married women produce the worst outcomes. (Murray, 158)
Tracing data as far back as the American Revolution, nonmarital births to white women held steady at well below 5% up through the 1960s. “White children were conceived outside marriage at varying rates in different social classes, but hardly ever born outside marriage in any class.” Up through the 1960s, American marital norms had followed what Bronislaw Malinowski has referred to as a “universal sociological law.”
Every culture, he concluded, had a norm that ‘no child should be brought into the world without a man—and one man at that—assuming the role of sociological father, that is, guardian and protector, the male link between the child and the rest of the community.’ Without that man, ‘the group consisting of a woman and her offspring is sociologically incomplete and illegitimate.’ (Murray, citing Malinowski, 160)
As cited earlier, “for the first time in human history,” American society no longer considers a single, unmarried mother’s children to be “illegitimate.” With the stigma removed, one might think that white women across all classes—including the celebrated Murphy Brown-style successful single career women— would take advantage of this new “alternative,” but they do not. The increases in nonmarital white births in America can be correlated almost entirely to education. With fewer than 16 years of education, it is more likely than not that a young woman will have a baby without a husband. “For women who did not finish high school, the percentage was closing in on levels in excess of 60 percent of the live births that previously have been associated with the black underclass.” This was not always the case. In 1963, “the marriage percentages for college grads and highs school dropouts were about the same.” Marriage, in America, was never just for the chosen few. It was, as the founders intended, the bedrock of society—all of society.
From RECLAIMING THE WISDOM OF HOMO INCURVATUS IN SE: “MAN TURNED IN ON HIMSELF” AS AN ENTRY POINT FOR THE DISCUSSION OF SIN IN 21ST-CENTURY AMERICA by Heather Choate Davis
We have said that the primary curbs that support and enforce marriage have historically been sexual consequences and social mores. It is not hard to imagine that as individuals became more inclined to reject sexual purity for themselves, they were less interested in condemning impurity in others. Shame, “the emotion that reveals a culture’s moral norms,” therefore, fell by the wayside in the final decades of the 20th century. Peer pressure—fueled by an overly sexual commercial and entertainment culture—was more inclined to promote than discourage sexual behavior. Sin, which now “fails to strike fear in the hearts of many religious believers,” left the Church in the West straining “to find its bearings in a sexually charged landscape.” Christians could no longer claim to be an example, with a divorce rate equal to that of the general population. And, as America entered the 21st century, the upper class—the group that is supposed to “set the standard for the society”— seemed to have lost its sense of moral obligation. “The upper class still does a good job of practicing some of the virtues, but it no longer preaches them. It has lost self-confidence in the rightness of its own customs and values, and preaches nonjudgmentalism instead.” Although women with college degrees give birth out of wedlock less than 5% of the time, it is “impermissible” in the new upper class to use “a derogatory label for nonmarital births.” In fact, successful, well-educated people today only consider it socially acceptable to pass judgment on three groups: “people with differing political views, fundamentalist Christians, and rural working-class whites.” (Charles Murray, Coming Apart)
Without a culture that reinforces the virtues of marriage—and clearly articulates the relationship between marriage, education, and quality of life—the essential fabric of American democracy is eroded. How can there be trust, confidence, hope, justice, fellowship, independence, and love in a country in which only a minority are making good on the basic commitment to build a stable home. This seems the inevitable lesson of the gospel of Luke (16:10 NRSV): “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much.” To trust in one’s neighbors, to rely on a shared commitment to the greater good, to have faith that our children will be able to do the same, these great freedoms are founded on the presumption that every day, the vast majority of citizens are practicing being faithful to the small promises they made to their own families, such that they might have the skills of character needed to step up and assist with the larger needs of the community. Marriage, the essential tool of maturity and wisdom, has been sacrificed by our perpetual inward turn toward that one primal, disordered desire: freedom to be sexual without restraint.
The physical and spatial metaphor of curvature . . . betrays a person withdrawn into a fixed, intense, self-regard, oblivious to her surroundings. The narrowness of such a gaze caused by its attention to only one object, causes us to miss the world (not to mention God) for what it is. All else sits in the fuzziness of peripheral vision and is only seen in reference to the primary object, ourselves. The irony in the midst of our fixed focus on ourselves, however, is that our inattention to all that is not ourselves is part of the reason that we mis-read ourselves as well, not least in that we are ‘lumpishly insensitive to the intensity of our predicament before God.’ (Matt Jenson, The Gravity of Sin)
When America was a clean slate and our best and brightest were dedicated to creating a new nation that would support individual freedoms like no other before it, they understood full well that certain personal desires would need to be voluntarily renounced for the good of the whole. The price of those small denials was well worth the blessing of a nation that so wholeheartedly supported the rights of each man to reach his full potential. Somewhere along the line—most notably in the early 1960s—we allowed ourselves to forget the trade-off. Like kids at a birthday party who wanted nothing more than to lick the icing off the cupcakes, we began to value our sexual freedom above all else. Anyone who tried to point out the consequences of that trend was deemed “a square” and a “prig.” The heart wants what the heart wants we declared—and now we have it, wretched consequences and all. By denying the timeless truth that “the first bond of society is marriage,” (Cicero) and the corollary reality that, “as the bond goes, so goes society,” homo incurvatus in se has put America’s very future at risk.
From RECLAIMING THE WISDOM OF HOMO INCURVATUS IN SE: “MAN TURNED IN ON HIMSELF” AS AN ENTRY POINT FOR THE DISCUSSION OF SIN IN 21ST-CENTURY AMERICA by Heather Choate Davis
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