I have been asked to discuss the intellectual foundations of the contemporary ‘marriage movement.’  I want to start with my own story, which may serve as a rough approximation of a course also taken by others and I want to give emphasis to the early history of this movement.

I grew up as a child of the Baby Boom, living in a suburb-like neighborhood in Des Moines, Iowa.  My father’s parents had been immigrants from Sweden; my father and his brothers—immigrant kids—had entered the military during World War II, and had come out as officers in the Air Corps and Navy.  They all went on to the University of Iowa, where two became CPA’s and the youngest, my uncle, eventually a Lutheran Pastor.  I had a brother and a sister, a stay-at-home mother, a family dog, and a good sized backyard.  My public schools were conventional, and good; my childhood, quite happy.  When I left for college in 1967, I simply assumed I would try to replicate this good life, this American Way, understanding that it would begin by finding a wife-to-be and building a home.

Well, by Autumn of my sophomore year, I had found that wife-to-be (and there she sits).  By 1968, though, even my Christian college—Augustana in Rock Island, Illinois—was being torn apart by crisis.  Mounting controversy over the Vietnam War, urban riots, confrontations over civil rights, the new, bra-burning feminism, marijuana and LSD, the “sex revolution,” the hippie counter-culture, hysterical accounts of over-population:  all converged in an cultural, intellectual, and moral assault on the American home.  Marriage was recast as patriarchal oppression; children became threats to the environment; the suburban home became an object of ridicule, and scorn.  All that I had held in respect, all that I had held dear, stood threatened.

This time of moral disorder grew during the early 1970’s.  Indeed, by 1975, free abortion was the law of the land; the traditional family of breadwinning father and stay-at-home mother was in economic and legal retreat; no-fault-divorce was sweeping across the country; feminism was reshaping vital American institutions—from seminaries to the American military academies.

By then, I was in graduate school, studying Modern European history.  As a dissertation topic, I was drawn to an earlier episode of family turmoil and decline: Sweden’s so-called “population crisis” of the 1930’s.  As in much of Europe of that time, Sweden’s marriage rate was declining, while its birthrate was in a near free-fall.  I researched and wrote on how Sweden’s political parties responded.  My focus was on the reaction of the Social Democrats, the socialist party that has dominated Swedish politics since 1930.  I looked, in particular, at the ideas about family policy developed by a married couple, Gunnar and Alva Myrdal.  Their 1934 book, Kris i befolkningfrågan (in English, Crisis in the Population Question), laid out a socialist case for strengthening marriage and encouraging more births and larger families.  Their analysis of the family problems found in the modern industrial world was actually very compelling: even if, in the end, it was wrong on some key points.  Still, I learned much from wrestling with their ideas.

While writing the dissertation (which eventually became this book, The Swedish Experiment in Family Politics), I took a job as a government affairs officer for the Lutheran Council in the USA.  Looking at recent American family statistics, I was stunned by the scope of recent change.  The Baby Boom of the 1945-64 period had been quickly replaced by the Baby Bust: marital fertility had fallen by 50 percent in a mere ten years: un unprecedented collapse.  The divorce rate was soaring; so was the illegitimacy rate, particularly among African-Americans.  The marriage rate was also starting to fall.  So, in the 1976-78 period, working with other religious lobbyists and leaders, I tried to fire some enthusiasm for pro-family, pro-marriage, and pro-birth initiatives.  I was stunned to find out that most main-line Protestant churches could care less.  Many churches of the time, it seemed, had in fact joined the anti-family cause.

Indeed, these years—1976 to 1978—were key years in fomenting a new pro-family, pro-marriage coalition.  Like me, many others were becoming aware that the traumas of the 1960’s had not been just some phase; they had done terrible and lasting damage to the American social fabric, to the American home.  New approaches were needed.  And so, in 1976, we see Phyllis Schlafly raising the banner of home and family against the feminists, challenging the nearly-ratified Equal Rights Amendment.  The next year, 1977, James Dobson inaugurates a small operation called Focus on the Family.  In 1978, the new Rockford College Institute holds the first national pro-family conference, “The Family: America’s Hope.”  The same year, the Free Congress Foundation launches the Library Court group, to organize a pro-family lobby in Washington.  It is soon publishing an idea journal, Family and Culture.  The American Family Institute, led by Republican strategists Carl Anderson and Bill Gribbin, launched the same year. 

For my part, I left the Lutheran Council at the end of 1978, and took a fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute.  My main focus was coming to grips with the new turmoil in American life: how to understand our current situation.  The main product of my intellectual struggle was an essay published in early 1980 by the idea journal, The Public Interest.  Entitled “Families, Sex, and the Liberal Agenda,” it critically dissected the liberal concept of “family policy,” showing in fact the true anti-family elements lurking beneath the surface.  These included: a false deference to so-called “new family forms” and an embrace of the sexual revolution.

In fact, this paper did have a large effect on the early pro-family movement [I brought copies along for those who are interested].  It also led me to take on this work, full time.  I joined The Rockford Institute, newly independent of the College, and we made family questions the centerpiece of our work.  Indeed, Family Questions became the title of my next book.  Our Center on the Family in America organized in 1987, and we began publishing The Family in America, a monthly monograph series on family matters.  One early title was “The Retreat from Marriage” (copies also available).  Led by Jerry Regier, the Family Research Council emerged in Washington, DC, an offshoot of Focus on the Family.  So did Concerned Women for America.  Our conferences in Rockford during the 1980’s, including “The Retreat from Marriage,” “When Families Fail: The Social Costs,” and “The Family Wage,” involved (and sometimes introduced to each other) participants including community organizer David Blankenhorn, political scientists Jean Bethke Elshtain, sociologist Norval Glenn, psychologist Paul Vitz, and sociologist Steven Nock, and journalist Maggie Gallagher.  All would go on to found study centers that would focus on the marriage issue: The Institute for American Values; the Council on Families in America; the National Marriage Project; The Initiative for Marriage and Public Policy; and the Institute for Psychological Studies.

This network of “think tanks” is now fairly large: perhaps two dozen, depending on how you count.  The “Marriage Movement Timeline,” prepared for this event highlights many of the recent reports and initiatives.  An important new development is the emergence of a new generation of young scholars who have won places—tenured positions—in prominent academic settings.  Nurtured indirectly by the pro-family think tanks, they are beginning to reshape their disciplines.  My prime example, here, is Bradford Wilcox, of the University of Virginia, author of the fine new book, Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands.

More broadly, the intellectual foundations of the contemporary “marriage movement” reach back to a series of sociologists who constructed a powerful narrative about the vital place of marriage in public life: Columbia University’s Robert Nisbet, author of Quest for Community and Twilight of Authority; Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind and The Roots of American Order.  Harvard’s Carle Zimmerman, author of the important volumes, Family and Society and Family and Civilization; Harvard’s Pitirim Sorokin, the Russian-American author of The Crisis of Our Age; the great 19^th Century French sociologist Frederick LePlay, author of Social Reform in France; his predecessor, Comte Louis de Bonald, author of the brilliant 1801 treatise, On Divorce; and long before them all, the sociology of Aristotle, who understood the social and familial nature of human kind.  All that we do today of a social science nature, whether we know it or not, rests on the work of these, our intellectual ancestors.