Early in my former career as a faculty member, I was teaching at a large public university and cultivated a reputation as a professor who actually knew his students’ names. I couldn’t help but notice, then, when a promising young African American woman who was doing very well in the course stopped attending or submitting assignments. Concerned, I e-mailed her to see if everything was alright and how I might help. The next day, she came into my office crying, saying I was the only professor to notice her absence. She then handed me the positive results of a pregnancy test.

She was terrified. In her mind, this baby was an obstacle to all her hopes and dreams, and to those of her boyfriend (the unborn baby’s father). She could not imagine raising this child without sacrificing her success and happiness, so she was strongly considering an abortion. Realizing at least one human life was at stake, I did my best to persuade her that she need not be afraid. I, for one, would go to tremendous lengths for the class she had with me, and that my church would gladly help. I told her how children inspire our creativity and give us so much meaning and purpose in life, giving context and depth to those hopes and dreams she shared. She went home the next day and, sadly, her parents encouraged her to get an abortion. I never saw her again.

For most of Western history, this was not the norm. But as the remaining vestiges of residual Christianity recede into the margins in the US and elsewhere, the historic religions are replaced by a new Gnostic obsession with radical autonomy, and an anti-culture-cocktail of therapeutic “morality,” materialism, scientism, and functional nihilism. There is seemingly no place for marriage and family in such an age. As freelance journalist, Kelli María Korducki, recently wrote in Business Insider: “Although it may be premature to declare the nuclear family officially over, the model is beginning to look more like a fringe lifestyle choice than the bedrock of American society.”

Korducki writes, “The nuclear family’s guise of self-sufficiency only barely conceals its toxic codependence with the market economy. But that dynamic also makes the nuclear family particularly vulnerable to economic pressures.” In response, some people have chosen to “innovate” and curate custom-built family alternatives in a manner comparable with creating a Facebook network. In their attempt to retain children and autonomy, they experiment with “polyamorous families, platonic co-parenting, and ‘mommunes’”—the latter functioning as a kind of cooperative community of mothers raising children in common. All of these alternatives are driven primarily by the love of one’s self and by the arrangement’s perceived economic utility.

Neither Korducki nor my former student is wrong to see in marriage, family, and childbearing something challenging and risky— economically and otherwise—but their diagnosis is deeply flawed. Like all therapeutic pursuits of radical autonomy, throwing out the family and childbearing is just another Gnostic attempt (in Eric Voegelin’s sense) to transform the very structure of reality into something more palatable. Reality never loses, though, and a successful assault on marriage and family will only result in greater human suffering across every conceivable demographic.

Correcting this diagnosis and countering the assault from American elites, especially, will require considerable resources and effort. But the stakes are high—much higher than the results of a given election or court case. There is a desperate need for those who cherish Western civilization to defend marriage and the family and to strengthen the institutions of faith and civil society that support them. We need to help our fellow Americans rethink and reimagine what it means to be a mom, dad, husband, wife, brother, sister, son, daughter, and citizen.

Culture, Not Economics

We can start by getting our facts straight, and when it comes to marriage and family, few voices are as clear and important as that of Brad Wilcox and Timothy P. Carney. In Wilcox’s book, Get Married, he demolishes myth after myth regarding the social and economic realities of marriage. Despite many popular narratives, like Korducki’s above, on virtually every indicator one can measure, a strong, stable marriage favors human flourishing for men, women, and children.

Wilcox observes that there are four particular groups who, according to extensive data, tend to value and cultivate strong and stable marriages: Strivers, the Faithful, Conservatives, and Asian Americans. Strivers are “those educated and affluent Americans from which our ‘ruling class’ of elites is drawn.” The “faithful” are those who attend their respective religion’s worship gatherings regularly. Conservatives are essentially those who emphasize hard work, personal responsibility, “traditional values” like monogamous heterosexual marriage, the existence of only two genders, and that religion is of great social value. Asian Americans are mostly immigrants over recent decades, primarily from China, India, the Philippines, and South Korea.

These categories demonstrate that shifts in marriage practice and beliefs about marriage are primarily cultural. While economic realities and public policies can have an impact (typically a negative one), they are secondary. Wilcox also observes a great irony that elites, especially in higher education and in wealthy communities generally, are the ones who have done the most to publicly demean and sabotage marriage despite being the ones who benefit most from it. They are often the “strivers.” Those who suffer the most from the decline in marriage are the poor, but those same elites seldom propose marriage itself as a remedy. Instead, “they’ll argue that we need to deepen our dedication to work; have the government fund childcare, spend more on education, expand access to contraception, or spend more on cash welfare programs” and so on. Sadly, their recommendations perpetuate the dependence, isolation, and atomization that, at best, keeps the poor and destitute where they are.

Get Married is a reservoir of statistical insights, quotes, and summaries that counter prevailing narratives. We learn, for example, that married men are less likely to be fired than single men and they make 10-20 percent more than their single peers with similar backgrounds. Married men and women report higher levels of meaning, less loneliness, and tend to be happier than unmarried people overall. To be sure, Wilcox is not at all denying the reality of broken marriages wrecked by divorce, infidelity, and violence, but these are exceptions and not the rule. He also acknowledges that not everyone is meant for marriage. But there is simply no evidence that being married, in the short and long term, is inherently at odds with one’s economic well-being and mental health.

What about “family diversity,” like that mentioned by Korducki? Is it enough to just have love and money, regardless of the relationship? The data does not support this narrative either. Family diversity, with far less stable marriages, is especially hard on children. For example, young adults who come from a home where the marriage between their biological parents is intact and stable are “twice as likely to earn a four-year college degree than those from other family types, even after controlling for factors that we know affect the odds of graduation—like parents’ race or education level.” It’s not just seen in education either, since “young men from families without both of their parents, are, incredibly, more likely to go to prison (21 percent) than they are to graduate from college (14 percent).” Physical, sexual, and emotional abuse are also all more common in non-intact families.

The data on family diversity, as Wilcox presents it, primarily—and rightly—focuses on the children. But it would be enlightening to also explore the impact on the parents or whoever is inhabiting that particular role. Given family diversity’s emphasis on individualism and autonomy, it’s hard to see how such relationships can be emotionally and spiritually edifying. Indeed, regardless of the family arrangement, his data shows that a “we-before-me” emphasis in a marriage overwhelmingly advantages those who hold to it. Marriage driven by self-interest will run out of gas and patience quite quickly.

Wilcox further undermines the whole “soulmate” myth—“the idea that love is primarily about feeling a passionate connection to our beloved that makes us feel happy”—which turns out to result more often in unhappiness and divorce. To be sure, he’s not advocating that one ought to marry for money or a similarly utilitarian reason, but those who focus more on marriage as a partnership in raising children and family just do better. Where love is an action first rather than a fleeting feeling, it will likely last longer.

Wilcox also confronts the way some treat marriage as a temporary contract, planning for divorce and eschewing basic boundaries. Open marriages and low levels of commitment set couples up for failure. There’s also interesting evidence to suggest that the more “traditional” arrangement of work has a positive impact: among married mothers aged 18-55, 74 precent report being “very happy” when their husbands are employed full time. On this latter point, though, there’s a lot of subjectivity. Men and women have a varied sense of what a “fair balance” is between work, childcare, housework, and so on. Every couple also differs in terms of what their expectations are with sex, provision, and quality time. But the overwhelming trend in all of Wilcox’s work is that a hyper-individualistic obsession with individual autonomy is at odds with quality, stable relationships and human flourishing in general.

The Parent Trap

Korducki’s assertions have virtually no basis in empirical reality, but what about my promising pregnant student? She was not, like so many others, eschewing marriage yet. She was worried about the “parent trap,” as Wilcox calls it: the belief that having children destroys marriages and dreams. My student was not unusual at all, in this regard. Her generation and my own have consistently disparaged childbearing as ecologically irresponsible and antithetical to one’s autonomy and mental health.

There is more than an element of truth, though, in my students’ fears, and Tim Carney’s brilliant book, Family Unfriendly, does much to elucidate why. Parents in the United States are plagued by anxiety and exhaustion, Carney observes, and the reasons are a complex web of deep fear, paranoia, community dysfunction, and bureaucratic tyranny. The dominant culture of parenting places unreasonable expectations on parents and their kids, to the point where we’re spending more time, energy, and money on raising children while witnessing a sharp decline in children’s mental and metabolic health, not to mention their academic performance.

Carney, a married father of six, calls us to respond by lowering our unreasonable ambitions for our kids and leaving them alone more often. Driven by social-media comparisons and unhelpful “parenting experts” (as if such a thing could exist), we are asking our kids to be super-human before they’ve had a chance to figure out what it means to just be human. We obsess about trying to control many things that we simply cannot control and try to sterilize and sanitize ourselves and a world that refuses to conform to our idealized vision of family life. We plan every detail, expect the worst of everyone around us, design cities and neighborhoods that promote isolation, and eschew the institutions and communities that parents desperately need to avoid burnout. The result is that the US joins most of Europe and East Asia in falling well below the “replacement level” of births.

Family Unfriendly makes use of data less than Wilcox’s volume, but he shares a wealth of empirical evidence and compelling anecdotes to show how American culture and policy have undermined and failed the family. Echoing his brilliant 2019 book, Alienated America, Carney rightly points us to a needed revival of civil society and intermediary institutions: “Cultural institutions—specifically religious institutions—will need to take the lead on making America more family friendly. Churches, local schools, employers, nonprofits, Little Leagues, and community centers can’t pass the obligation off to state and federal government.” These groups can help re-write the story my student and her parents told themselves, while also resisting harmful and empirically bogus narratives about population control.

Using examples from “little platoons” in America and Israel, and after looking at policies in France and elsewhere, Carney gives many glimpses of hope for how we might move forward publicly and privately toward being more pro-family in general. Indeed, Carney has a gift not only for offering a clear picture of all that ails us, but his hopefulness and creativity are encouraging and worth discussing from church councils and county board meetings to Congress.

Speaking of Congress, it is difficult to read Carney’s book and not conclude that the government’s “mandated helicopter parenting,” and the state and local laws shaping Child Protective Services and similar agencies, are at the heart of much of our malaise. Indeed, I often must remind my kids, who desire to be more “free range,” that I do trust them. I just do not trust my neighbors to not report me. Furthermore, there is a culture dominant on the left that seems to genuinely believe we hold our children in common and that I, as a parent, have no more authority over their education and upbringing than the voter next door. So while I agree with Carney that we need community and our neighbors’ help, so many of those same neighbors advance beliefs about gender, sexuality, and morality that are openly hostile to my family’s faith. If I had more neighbors like the Wilcoxes and Carneys, I would likely feel differently.

Wilcox and Carney offer convincing arguments that getting married and having kids is a recipe for happiness and human flourishing. Elites in education, politics, and the media have regularly disparaged this perspective as nostalgic, patriarchal, and exploitative. But the data—and many of their own life choices—betray their hypocrisy and ignorance of empirical reality. Their materialistic conceptions of the human person, anti-cultural obsession with autonomy, and reflexive disdain for tradition have advanced a narrative about marriage and parenting that benefits no one.

An aspect of this narrative and the decline in marriage and family which both Carney and Wilcox emphasize, and which cannot be overstated, is the immense role religious institutions can and must play. At its core, the hostility to marriage and childbearing is a barely veiled broadside against religion, and especially Christianity. Yet, Wilcox’s data and Carney’s storytelling show repeatedly that greater religiosity does not lead to unhappiness and oppression. While there are individual press-grabbing churches that cultivate a toxic and often heterodox sub-culture, leaving faith behind entirely does not enhance anyone’s marriage and family. 

In both books, there’s a missing element that needs to be considered beyond the standard literature, and that is the notion of emotional and spiritual maturity. If marriages are going to increase and survive, and if mothers and fathers are going to continue to choose life and childbearing over abortion and despair, we do not merely need more generic “communities” and personal friends. We need spiritually and emotionally mature “platoons” in churches and neighborhoods. We need deeper communities and relationships, and less therapeutic Gnosticism wrapped in superficial religiosity.

Wilcox and Carney should be supplemented by other recently published works, such as Seth Kaplan’s Fragile Neighborhoods and Catherine Pakaluk’s Hannah’s Children. Together, these books demonstrate why robust civil society, strong marriages, and growing families are foundational to reversing America’s social, economic, and cultural pathologies.