Written by Patience Griswold

A recent Gallup survey found that just 29 percent of Americans believe it is very important for a couple who has children together to be married, down from 49 percent in 2006. The survey also found that only 38 percent of Americans said that it is very important for a couple that plans to stay together for the rest of their lives to be married — a disparity that indicates a shift in how Americans think about marriage and family, with fewer Americans seeing the two as going hand in hand.

Several commentators have pointed out that while marriage rates have been dropping for some time, and our culture increasingly minimizes the importance of marriage in forming stable families, Gallup’s research shows a significant and alarming decline in support for marriage among groups that have traditionally been pro-marriage and family, including conservatives, Americans over the age of 55, and people who attend church weekly. While 67 percent of weekly church attendees said that it is very important for a couple who plans to stay together for the rest of their lives to be married, only 45 percent of weekly church attendees said that it is very important for a couple who has children together to be married. Even in the church, a shrinking number of people recognize how important it is for couples who have children together to be married.

Another subgroup that surprisingly did not place a higher value on parents being married was respondents with children under the age of 18. Gallup reports,

Parents of minor children (30 percent) are not significantly more likely than nonparents (27 percent) to view marriage as critical. Those who are currently married (33 percent) are slightly more likely than those who are not married (25 percent) to say it is important, though the current eight-percentage-point gap between these two groups has narrowed from 16 points in 2006.

Cohabitation is not the same as marriage, and the difference is clear when looking at the data for how children fare when raised by cohabiting versus married parents. Additionally, two out of every three unmarried couples who have children together split up by the time their child is 12 years old, meaning that children cohabitating couples are more likely to face the very real loss of fatherlessness or motherlessness than not.

Children do best when they are raised by their married mom and dad because no mother can fill the role of a father, and no father can fill the role of a mother. Children who are raised by their married parents are less likely to experience poverty, less likely to be incarcerated, and more likely to graduate from college, and mere financial support does not fill the void left by an absent parent.

Family stability matters for children, and cohabitation undermines that. Even when cohabiting couples choose to marry, marriages that begin with cohabitation are more likely to end in divorce. Unfortunately, over half of America’s young adults believe that the opposite is true, saying that living together before marriage increases the likelihood of a successful marriage.

Currently, only half of the children in the U.S. are raised by their married mother and father. This is a real loss that comes with significant harm to children, adults, and entire communities. Marriage and family are the bedrock of society and we need to be investing in building strong marriages and families and pursuing policies that encourage the formation of strong families, rather than penalizing them. Coming alongside children and families affected by family breakdown is also vital — children who have experienced family breakdown but are raised in communities with strong families fare better than children who experience family breakdown and are not surrounded by families with stable marriages at their core.

Despite popular opinion, it is very important that couples who have children together be married, and the church needs to lead the way in recognizing this fact by encouraging and strengthening marriages and families. Marriage and family are designed to go hand in hand, and everyone benefits when both are valued.

This article was originally published by the Minnesota Family Council.

One of the often-cited claims that seems to have taken hold is that the divorce rate in the church is the same as outside of the church. Yet, is this really true? The claim overlooks what the research really says about church attendance and its impact upon both marriage and divorce rates.

Marriage and church attendance have been falling in America as rates of cohabitation and out of wedlock births have increased over the last 50 years. The decline of religion and marriage have received a lot of attention, but the link between the two has sometimes been overlooked.

Christianity generally encourages marriage and discourages divorce. It would be peculiar to assume that those beliefs would not have any impact on the marital choices of believers. To understand why the claim of equal divorce rates hangs on, it is necessary to look at the devout.

Those who attend church three times a month, call them the devout, and those who attend church once a month or less, call them the less devout, reveals a clearer picture of marriage and divorce. While 70 percent of Americans describe themselves as Christian, that number is roughly twice the number of the devout who regularly attend church.

The devout have higher rates of marriage and significantly lower rates of divorce than the less devout and overall general public. Thus, active Christians do have a divorce rate different from the secular or less devout. To read more about this, click HERE.

This article was originally published by AFA of Indiana.

In a new study published by the research organization Barna Group, church attendance trends around the country were analyzed:

A trusted measure of religiosity over the decades has been church attendance and, for the most part, Americans are attending church less. But those shifts have occurred in varying ways and at different rates throughout the diverse regions and cities across the country.

. . .

Based on Barna’s most recent data, almost four in 10 (38%) Americans are active churchgoers, slightly more (43%) are unchurched, and around one-third (34%) are dechurched.

It probably comes as no surprise that four of the top five most “churched” cities in America are found in the South. Salt Lake City, Utah rounds out the list.

Three of the top five “unchurched” cities will also probably shock few people: San Francisco, Reno, and Las Vegas. Two cities in Massachusetts also made the top five.

Many Christians and other supporters of the Judeo-Christian ethic understand that the rate of church attendance impacts our country and our culture. The bad news is that, as professor Carson Holloway writes at the Heritage Foundation, “In recent years, Americans have lost sight of religion’s positive contribution to creating and sustaining our democracy.”

The American Founders, Holloway writes, “intended to institute a secular government but insisted that it required a religious foundation”:

For example, in his Farewell Address, George Washington reminded his countrymen that “religion and morality” are the “firmest props of the duties of men and citizens” and therefore are “indispensable supports” of “the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity.” He added, moreover, that morality depends on religion: “[R]eason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” Religion, he thus suggested, is necessary to the preservation of “free government.”

“In seeking to renew our understanding of religion’s contribution to freedom,” Holloway writes, “we can turn to no better teacher than [19th century writer] Alexis de Tocqueville.”

Tocqueville explained more thoroughly than anyone else why religion, though in some ways a pre-modern and pre-democratic phenomenon, is nevertheless essential to the health of modern democracy. This is one of the key themes of his monumental study, Democracy in America.

Modern democratic freedom, Tocqueville argues, developed as a result of Christianity’s influence on European civilization, and more particularly as a result of Puritanism’s influence on American civilization. This link is not accidental: Political freedom requires an unshakable moral foundation that only religion can supply.

Moreover, religion is necessary not only to democracy’s emergence, but also to its preservation. Democracy fosters intellectual and moral habits that can be deadly to freedom: the tyranny of the majority, individualism, materialism, and democratic despotism. American Christianity acts as a corrective to these perilous democratic tendencies.

Here is Holloway taking it a step further:

Accordingly, Tocqueville concludes, the preservation of America’s traditional religion is one of the most important tasks of democratic statesmanship. Indeed, he goes so far as to say that religion “should be considered the first” of America’s “political institutions” and even that it is necessary for Americans to “maintain Christianity…at all cost.”

Holloway then makes the point that is unfortunately backed up by the Barna study:

To summarize Tocqueville’s teaching thus is to be reminded of how much America has changed since he examined it, and this in turn raises the question whether Tocqueville’s teaching is any longer relevant to us. Christianity today possesses nothing like the public moral authority that it had in the 1830s. Today’s America is less religious overall than Tocqueville’s America, and religious Americans today are more diverse in their religious beliefs than were the Americans of Tocqueville’s day.

Holloway then makes another key argument:

These changes, however, do not render Tocqueville’s account irrelevant. He wrote not as a religious teacher aiming to propagate a particular faith, but instead as a political analyst interested in the kind of religious beliefs necessary to uphold freedom and democracy. Moreover, Tocqueville saw democracy’s dynamism and understood its tendency to change the country’s religious landscape.

Accordingly, Tocqueville wrote not with a view to preserving completely intact a particular religion, but instead to discover the religious essentials of the free society and to explain how and to what extent they can be preserved. His thought therefore invites us not to a fruitless nostalgia for an unrecoverable past, but instead to an intelligent application of the lessons of the past to the obligations of the present—especially our obligation to preserve and pass on the free society that we have inherited.

There are many reasons people don’t attend church — chief among them is that our churches are filled with sinners. However, we are told that we should not forsake “the assembling of ourselves together” in Hebrews 10:25. Fellowship, encouragement, burden sharing and serving one another can only be done in community.

In short, church attendance is a blessing to you, your family and to other members of the flock. Don’t let any excuses stand in the way of becoming a regular part of Christian fellowship.

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Last week there was another proclamation of the death of Christianity in America with a new Pew Research Center study on religious practices in America.   The talking points from the study noted the rise of atheism as many commentators said that Americans are “turning their backs on religion.”

Certainly there were some disheartening findings in the study, but it was also a glass half full or half empty perspective. For example of the 51 percent who say that they regularly attend church, 23 percent say that they have always been regular attendees.  However, 27 percent say that they are attending now more than in the past.

The study focused largely on religious decline, the positive here is that Americans who are regularly attending church now appear to be deepening their faith. More are saying that they are more likely to attend church now than they were in the past.

Also overlooked by many was the finding that of the 49 percent who say that they rarely attend church, most say that this is nothing new, only 22 percent say that they attend less now than in the past.