The family is a dangerous institution.

Which is why the forces of evil are aggressively targeting it. The family—consisting of one man and one woman in lifelong wedlock, and their children—is God’s ordained means of filling the earth (Genesis 1:28, 2:24, 4:1, 9:1). This poses a threat to those who worship nature, and thus want to reduce world population. Not only that, the family is also a reflection of Christ’s relationship to the church (Ephesians 5:22-33). This poses a threat to those who worship themselves, and thus reject the concepts of self-sacrifice and submission.

Further, the family is the nuclear institution for raising up the next generation in righteousness (Deuteronomy 6:7, Ephesians 6:4). This poses a threat to those who worship power, and thus want young minds to be left exclusively to themselves and their indoctrination. All in all, if you are looking to wreak maximum havoc on the earth, then one of the most dangerous institutions you will ever encounter is the family. And those who are looking to wreak havoc on the earth are doing their best to get rid of it.

However, an all-out assault on the family structure would be a bit too obvious. People have a God-given desire for the joys of family built into their souls and trying to convince them that they shouldn’t start families might not gain very much traction. As is the case with many contemporary strains of leftist strategy, it’s a lot easier to just slip in “alternatives” to God-given structures and paint them as a liberating, fulfilling, alternate norm.

A recent Bloomberg report did just so, by exploring the lives of successful, single, childless women, showing how avoiding marriage and childbearing improved their careers and personal wealth. According to Bloomberg, a rising cohort of women is choosing to delay or skip motherhood.

“As a result, many are advancing further in their careers than prior generations and entering a new frontier of wealth.”

While single mothers only made a median wage of $7,000 in 2019, single women without kids made a median of $65,000. Bloomberg explains that one woman interviewed

“relishes all of the lifestyle and financial freedoms that come with being a single, child-free woman in a well-paying job. That includes an apartment in New York City, a new beach house on the Jersey Shore, and frequent travel for pleasure as well as work.”

Further,

“she has a message for women just like her: You can still have it all. . . . ‘I love my life and feel very fulfilled.’ ”

Another successful, single woman highlighted her freedom to travel at will without a family holding her back and boiled her thinking down to

“I’d rather regret not having kids than regret having them.“

Such anecdotes may seem to support the idea that a family-free life is more advantageous than—and can be just as fulfilling as—a married one. However, as a general rule, neither the claim to financial advantage nor the claim to life satisfaction turn out to be true. As Brad Wilcox (sociology professor at the University of Virginia) and Alysse ElHage (editor of Family Studies) Newsweek retort,

“There’s just one problem with this kind of anti-nuptial and anti-natalist reporting: It’s completely false. In fact, the Bloomberg story is based on data derived only from single Americans, meaning there is no basis for comparison with married women.”

While single childless women may indeed make significantly more than single mothers, neither comes close to married mothers’ mean household income—$133,000. As for life satisfaction, Wilcox and ElHage point to data from the 2022 American Family Survey:

“Thirty-three percent of married mothers ages 18-55 say they are ‘completely satisfied’ with their lives, compared to 15 percent of childless women 18-55 . . . What’s more, single, childless women are about 60 percent more likely to report feelings of loneliness compared to married mothers.”

While the mainstream narrative shouts that a career without an encumbering family is the secret to a happy life, the stats show the opposite.

Very few people will believe the outright lie, “the family is bad,” but many might believe the more subtle temptation, “the family is a waste of time; you could live a better life without one.” However, attacks on the family that paint singleness to be just as fulfilling and even more financially advantageous don’t stand up to serious scrutiny. As happens so often when man thinks he has found a better plan than God’s, man’s grand ideas splinter against the solid realities of God’s world.

The Institute for Family Studies sums it up well:

“Too many [liberals] have embraced the false narrative that the path to happiness runs counter to marriage and family life, not towards it. They think independence, freedom, and work will make them happy, which is why significant portions of the popular media are filled these days with stories celebrating divorce and singleness. . . . The secret to happiness, for most men and women, involves marriage and a life based around the family.“

The title is a reference to a concept espoused decades ago by U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY). The idea was not original to Moynihan, but the phrase meant that as bad behavior becomes more pervasive a limit is crossed and society simply begins to accept it.

The same year that Senator Moynihan gained notice for his comments, columnist Charles Krauthammer expanded Moynihan’s point by suggesting the opposite. Not only were we “normalizing what was once considered deviant,” but we were also “finding deviant what was once considered normal.” As morals decline, the rejection of morality also occurs. We see this more and more today.

It seems that the pervasive nature of pornography, which is available like never before in history, is impacting mindsets. According to Gallup Polling, the percent of Americans who now say that pornography is “morally acceptable” is at an all-time high with 43 percent now expressing this view, up from 36 percent in the previous year’s survey.

The Institute for Family Studies discusses some of the implications of this.  One of the problems they note is that the people who view pornography at younger ages are less likely to marry or more likely to delay marriage.

The theory that porn use is linked to a decline in marriage is one that University of Austin professor Mark Regnerus, the author of Cheap Sex, has noted with the Institute before. “At best, porn will augment—or compete with—sex, and stall marriage,” Regnerus warned. “At worst, sexual technology threatens to undermine coupled sex altogether.”

Beyond marriage, other experts worry about the long-term impact of widespread pornography on the mental, emotional, and spiritual health of young people who are growing up in a porn-saturated world.  A study by BYU professor and family therapist Mark Butler found a link between young people’s increasing use of pornography and their experience of loneliness and isolation. Butler suggested that pornography’s “potential to mislead and misshape young people’s views of women and men, relationships, intimacy, and sexuality during their formative years is very real—making a pornography-loneliness partnership a threat to their overall sexual and relational well-being.”

This article was originally published by AFA of Indiana.

During the COVID shutdown, I would bet that a lot of families watched more movies or TV series than they might have without a national quarantine. While left on my own, I will invariably choose an old western, war movie, or police show from years ago. But if my wife and I are watching something, and sometimes even with the kids too, we are much more likely to see a romantic comedy than exploding tanks or screaming Indians.

You may have noticed in modern movies that there is an ideal of finding one’s soulmate in romantic movies. Modern progressive ideology of a marriage being about self-fulfillment, more than commitment, is clearly evident in our culture.

This is not to say one should marry someone whom they don’t enjoy simply because they are willing to marry. But if marriage is about self-fulfillment and the things that two people do together, what happens when times get tough or if one partner develops dementia or a disease? What if sailing, golf, or travel are no longer possible or no longer enjoyable together?

If marriage is about love and companionship between partners who can largely concentrate on doing fun things they like together, does this model have pitfalls, or does it make for more happier marriages as might often be seen on a sitcom or the Hallmark Channel?

The proponents of this more utilitarian approach to marriage do not deny that it will lead to more divorce as couples split when a marriage loses its usefulness for self-fulfillment, and a spouse simply moves on. However, they argue that their approach makes for more happier marriages, the cream of the crop theory so to speak, as those who are not fulfilled separate and those who remain are the happiest.

Divorce has climbed dramatically in the US and in societies where the belief that marriage should only last as long as matrimony brings self-fulfillment. Yet, has this truly brought happiness?

Bradford Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies has a fascinating article about this in which he notes that while divorce has increased dramatically since the early 1970’s, marital happiness has not. About 67 percent of husbands and wives were “very happy” about their marriage in the early 1970s, but only about 62 percent of them were very happy by the late-1980s, according to the General Social Survey.

What is especially striking about this decline in marital quality is that, according to progressive logic, marital quality should have improved in the 1970s and 80’s as fewer and fewer Americans married and many supposedly second-rate marriages were dissolved.

Wilcox astutely notes,

What proponents of the progressive view did not really anticipate is this: if your parents, best friend, and sister all get divorced, your confidence in your own marriage is likely to take a hit. That’s because how we think about and approach our own union is deeply affected by what we see happening in the marriages of our friends and family members. Worries about the future of your own marriage, in turn, reduce your sense of emotional security, willingness to invest in your relationship, and happiness in your own marriage.

In his own recent study of California women, Wilcox concludes that how one views the permanency of marriage has a big impact upon marital happiness. He found, 82 percent of those who embrace an ethic of marital permanence report being satisfied in their marriages, compared to 77 percent of those who take the more conditional or functional view of marriage.

Why? Wilcox asks.

“In most marriages, knowing that you and your spouse are deeply committed to one another, come what may, fosters many other marital goods: more trust, more emotional security, more mutually beneficial investments in one another and the marriage—both financially and emotionally—more fidelity, and a clearer vision for a joint future.  All of which translate, for the average couple, into higher levels of marital quality, especially compared to couples who do not share a commitment to marriage ‘til death do us part.”

This article was originally published by our friends at AFA of Indiana.

Last month, Erica Komisar, author of the book Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters, wrote an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal under the headline “Political Correctness is Bad for Kids.”

In her first paragraph, Komisar writes:

Family life shouldn’t be politicized, but a new poll suggests that it is. Only 33% of U.S. liberals “agree that marriage is needed to create strong families,” according to the survey from the Institute for Family Studies. The figures are 80% of conservatives and 55% of moderates.

Despite her status as a liberal and self-declared feminist, Komisar goes on to write that,

“On this subject, the conservative majority is right. Marriage provides children both emotional and material security, and the ideal environment for children is a loving household with both a sensitive and empathic mother and a playful, engaged and protective father. It’s a shame that political correctness inhibits discussions of what’s best for children.”

It’s remarkable, isn’t it? We’ve come to the point in America when standing up for traditional views on marriage and motherhood is controversial. James Taranto, in a 2017 piece for The Wall Street Journal, quotes Komisar as saying that the publication of her book had made her “a bit of a pariah” on the left. She had been interviewed on Christian radio and Fox & Friends but couldn’t get on NPR. She had been “rejected wholesale” by the liberal press, and when she went on ABC’s Good Morning America, the interviewer told her right before they went on that, “I don’t believe in the premise of your book at all. I don’t like your book.” All of this presumably because she was challenging mothers to “prioritize motherhood” to the maximum extent they could, which, apparently, is perceived as a threat to the idea that a woman can have it all, all at the same time.

I don’t have any data on this, but I suspect we wouldn’t have to rewind history very far to find virtually universal support for both marriage and motherhood. But in today’s increasingly liberal society, traditional views on these matters are fading.

The Bible, of course, gives us the truth on these subjects. God created marriage, therefore we know it’s important. God placed children in families, therefore we know that parents matter.

It’s not just the Bible. The very nature of creation also points to the importance of traditional families.

Have you ever considered the possibility that God could have created human existence in any way he chose? He was under no constraints to create marriage and the nuclear family as the basis for bringing children into the world and raising them to adulthood. Remember, He was starting with a blank canvas—He could have done anything. Hey, He could have created the world in such a way that human babies spring into existence through spontaneous generation and raise themselves to adulthood in baby communes deep in the forest. Why not? Just because it sounds crazy to us doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be completely normal if that’s the way it had always been. God gets to decide reality, and if He had chosen to create reality in a different way, that’s His privilege as the all-powerful Creator.

The fact that He chose to create the world in a certain way gives us clues as to how He intends human life to work best. The fact that He created marriage, family, and both mothers and fathers tells us something important: this is the way God wants the world to work. This is the way He created us to flourish and experience the best of His plans for us as His creation. And what the created order tells us implicitly, the Word of God tells us explicitly: marriage and parents are vital.

The bottom line is, God is the Creator of reality, and we have the best chance of happiness, satisfaction, joy, and success when we conform our lives to God’s created reality. When we shun the created order that God established—by rejecting marriage, for instance—we put ourselves at odds not simply with a moral code, but with reality itself.

On the other hand, if we reject God as creator, we’re left to come up with our own ideas of reality and how human life should work. We’re seeing this daily with the redefinition of marriage, the concept of “gender fluidity,” the rise of intentionally single mothers, and so on. We’re remaking family in whatever shape and form we choose because we’ve rejected God’s created reality and the truth of His Word. We think we can flourish in whatever way we choose. But violating reality will never produce the best results.

The cultural trends may be discouraging, but take heart. If you’re following God’s plan as outlined in Scripture and His created reality, trust Him to bless you and your family. Live as a testimony to the superiority of God’s ways. And in the midst of a culture increasingly out of alignment with God’s plan for humanity, you and I have the opportunity to shine as bright lights. Who knows? Perhaps your happy marriage can be the very thing God uses to draw others to Himself.

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Years ago, one might have assumed that new technology would simply replace the home telephone as a primary means of communication between the sexes.  For decades the stereotypical teenager spent hours on the family phone talking to a boyfriend or girlfriend while the parents worried about their phone bill or their own missed calls.

However, not only has technology changed communication, it has also changed how couples meet and date.

According to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Michael Rosenfeld, of Stanford University, compared the results of surveys conducted in 2009 and 2017, using them to track the ways people met their partners against the years in which the meetings took place.

The research found that online dating is going through the roof while the more traditional ways people meet are on the decline.

As the Institute for Family Studies observed, “It used to be that technology just helped us communicate more efficiently with our preexisting acquaintances, family, and coworkers. Now it helps us find and connect romantically with total strangers. In the 2017 survey, 90 percent of those who started their relationships online had no other connections to each other. Increasingly, it’s not our friends, siblings, and churches that serve as mediators between us and potential partners; apps and websites and their algorithms do.”

Research on this phenomenon is new and sparse and therefore may not yet be conclusive. However, a 2013 study, found that “marriages that began on-line, when compared with those that began through traditional off-line venues, were slightly less likely to result in a marital break-up (separation or divorce) and were associated with slightly higher marital satisfaction among those respondents who remained married.” A 2017 study similarly found that “meeting online does not predict couple breakup.”  It also found that marriages occur quicker through online dating services.

This article was originally published by AFA of Indiana.

Pornography is a massive problem in America, and likely around the globe as well.  To understand the $97 billion industry in average daily terms, porn sites get more visits each month in America than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined.

The pervasiveness of this corrosive material has all sorts of societal ramifications for everyone.  It plays a role in the coarsening of our culture. It leads to relationship problems. It drives an immoral demand that has now made America one of the top sex-trafficking nations in the world.

One must wonder how there could be any good news about this topic.

In a recent interview in The New Yorker, sociologist of religion, Samuel Perry said:

“What I found is that, whatever we think pornography is doing, those effects tend to be amplified when we’re talking about conservative Protestants. It seems to be uniquely harmful to conservative Protestants’ mental health, their sense of self, their own identities—certainly their intimate relationships—in ways that don’t tend to be as harmful for people who don’t have that kind of moral problem with it.”

As you might imagine, many reviews of Dr. Perry’s new book Addicted to Lust: Pornography in the Lives of Conservative Protestants, have liberals grinning over what they think is a huge hypocrisy.  Of course, when liberals talk about hypocrisy they don’t do so as a defense of the moral standard but as a means of discarding that standard.

One might think that given the title of this book, and Perry’s quote above, that he has researched and written about how Christian men are destroying their marriages with their angst over porn, while those who have no problem with porn use do not have similar relational problems, (because it’s no big deal to them).

That may be an interesting theory, but what his book and research actually point toward is much different than the sensational overviews.   According to the Institute for Family Studies, Perry’s research shows that protestant men, who regularly attend church, are actually about the only men in America still resisting the normalization of the use of porn.

As the Institute points out, “across all religious groups in America, people who attend religious services more frequently are far less likely to view pornography. Nominally-Protestant men are nearly five times more likely to view pornographic films as men who frequently (weekly) attend religious services.”

They also remind us that, “adherence to the sexual norms promoted by conservative Protestants— delaying sex until marriage and monogamy within marriage, including (for most) avoiding porn — is consistently associated with greater marital happiness.”

There are a lot more detailed findings on this subject from the Institute which can be read HERE.

This article was originally published by AFA of Indiana.

Marriage is not worth it for men. It’s not worth the practical and financial sacrifices, the lost romantic opportunities, or the “lack of freedom.” All in all, a spouse is a ball and chain—of little benefit to any man interested in pursuing happiness and well being.

Considering both the latest survey data and the continuing decline in the marriage rate, it’s fair to say that this viewpoint is becoming more entrenched in our society, particularly among younger men. 

But, despite its prevalence, the ball and chain view of marriage is simply not supported by the research. Indeed, the benefits of marriage for men are substantial by every conceivable measure, including more money, a better sex life, and significantly better physical and mental health. Yet, many men remain ignorant of these benefits, a view seemingly promoted by popular culture.

These are the opening paragraphs of a great briefing paper from the Institute for Family Studies which dispels many of the myths about marriage that are rampant in our culture.  While being a good husband is hard work, the paper points out that the benefits of marriage are numerous for both men and women, and even more so for children.

Natural marriage also has numerous societal and economic benefits. For example:

• Married men earn 10-40% more than comparable single men;
• Marriage increases the earning power of men;
• Married men are less likely to be fired from a job;
• The typical married man in his 50’s has three times the financial assets of his unmarried peer.

Since romance is the topic of the day on this Valentine’s holiday, it is also interesting to note that married men have better sexual relationships than their peers, including unmarried cohabiting, males.   According to the National Health and Social Life Survey, 51% of married men reported that they were “extremely” satisfied with their sex lives compared to only 39% of cohabiting men and 36 percent of single men.

Marriage also has health benefits for men. Research find that men who get married and stay married live almost 10 years longer than their unmarried peers. Married men and women appear to manage health better and adopt healthier lifestyles than their unmarried peers.

Lastly, married men tend to be happier than their cohabiting or unmarried peers. Married men tend to have better mental health outcomes and less depression than their peers.  To read or print out this report click this link: https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/ifs-researchbrief-menmarriage-083117.pdf

This article was originally published by AFA of Indiana.

Written by Jim Tankersley

There is a story gaining steam among some academics that suggests the institution of marriage — particularly marriage for parents of young children — could play an important role in strengthening the American economy. It is a story about growth and poverty, about responsibility and work ethic.

And largely, it is a story about men.

According to new research, states with a high concentration of married couples experience faster economic growth, less child poverty and more economic mobility than states where fewer adults are married, even after controlling for a variety of economic and demographic factors. The study, from the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies, also finds that the share of parents who are married in a state is a better predictor of that state’s economic health than the racial composition and educational attainment of the state’s residents.

It’s impossible to say for certain, from the research, whether higher marriage levels drive economic strength, or whether strong economies drive higher marriage levels. But the researchers say there is strong evidence that the two factors reinforce each other. “There’s a reciprocal tie between strong families and strong economies,” said W. Bradford Wilcox, a University of Virginia sociologist with ties to AEI and the Institute for Family Studies, who was the lead author on the report. “That tie goes in both directions. There’s a connection between what goes on in the home and what’s happening in the larger marketplace.”

What might be behind those links? The researchers suggest it’s the effects of marriage on men – particularly younger, lower-educated men. They believe getting married and becoming a father motivate those men to work more hours, bargain for more money and make better strategic decisions — such as drinking less and not quitting a job before another one is lined up — to improve their earning power.

“Marriage does seem to encourage men to get their act together,” Wilcox said. “They have a sense of responsibility. Their parents, their in-laws, their spouse, their neighbors and friends, all these people in their lives are expecting them to be more responsible, and they expect themselves to be more responsible.”

The study finds labor-force participation is substantially higher among married men with children than it is among unmarried men without them.

The opposite is true of women, though to a smaller degree: As they marry and have children, they work less. The researchers suggest the boost to male participation from marriage outweighs the drag on female participation, in terms of overall economic impact.

It’s well documented that marriage rates have fallen in America over the last generation. Children today are less likely than their parents were to grow up in a household that includes two married parents. That’s especially true of low-income and lower-educated Americans. Wilcox has long warned against that trend and its effects on society and the economy.

His new report, co-authored by Robert I. Lerman and Joseph Price, finds large differences between states with relatively high and low levels of adults who are married with children. Being in the top 20 percent of those states, as opposed to the bottom 20 percent, correlates to having a state economy that is $1,451 larger per person, with a median family income that is $3,654 higher. It also correlates to a 10.5 percent improvement in the chances that a child of a low-income family will climb the economic ladder as an adult, and with a 13.2 percent decline in the child poverty rate.

The analysis controls for a variety of factors that might have the effect of making the marriage-economy link look stronger. Those include state tax rates and infrastructure spending, educational levels, race, age and violent crime.

The report drew praise from a Elisabeth Jacobs, senior director for policy and academic programs at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, an inequality-focused think tank. “Economic insecurity and wage stagnation for the bottom 90 percent of Americans are undoubtedly contributing to family instability,” she said. “A growing body of research, including the new study from Dr. Wilcox and his colleagues, supports the idea that policymakers need to view economic stability and family stability as part of a feedback loop.”

Some candidates for president already talk about the links between marriage and mobility on the stump, including Republicans Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush. Wilcox and his fellow researchers suggest that policymakers should pursue a multi-pronged agenda to promote marriage, as an economic strategy.

Their ideas include eliminating so-called “marriage penalties” in federal aid programs that cut off benefits once married couples begin to earn a certain amount of combined income. They worry that by counting incomes jointly, the government is discouraging lower-income workers to shun marriage for fear of losing assistance.

They also propose strengthening vocational education, to boost ” skills, earnings, maturity and self-confidence of young men and women” in order to make them better candidates for marriage; efforts to reduce divorce rates, in part by requiring most couples to wait at least a year before divorcing; and launching a national public-service campaign to promote marriage among young people. They compare that potential campaign to previous campaigns to reduce teen pregnancy – another social trend that researchers have found negatively affects the economy.

This article was originally posted at the WashingtonPost.com