The current national crisis over the meaning of marriage, centered this week in Massachusetts, is something more than another public debate.  The issue of marriage cuts to the very heart of the American identity, to our self-definition as a people.

Some may be surprised to hear this.  After all, is not America really a nation of individuals and individualism, of lifestyle experimentation, of moral innovation, with family matters of secondary and fading public importance?  Or as contemporary voices ask, does not American democracy  stand for the steady expansion of individual rights—including “the right to marry”—to ever more categories of people?  As Nathan Glazer explains in his recent book, We Are All Multiculturalists Now:  “If progress is the spread of equality and liberty, one does not see how any good arguments can be made against gay and lesbian claims.”[1] 

This is, I believe, a false reading of American history and identity.  For alongside affirmation of the integrity and worth of the individual, the American nation has also been a land uniquely defined, from its origin to the modern era, by its commitment to marriage, understood as the bond of man and woman for procreation and the rearing of their children.  This defining trait of American nationhood goes well back into colonial times.

The Puritans, for example, were not the prudish, loveless folk so often parodied in our day.  Rather, as Edmund Morgan’s classic work, The Puritan Family, explains, these early Americans saw Christian marriage as the foundation of their community.  This Puritan vision of love “proceeded from Christian charity,” rested on reason and a consciousness of God’s sacred order, and was still “warm and tender and gracious.” 

It is true that a Puritan marriage often began with rational, deliberate choices.  Diaries from the time tell of young men setting out to find “a Woman of Merit—a woman of Good Temper and prudent Conduct and Conversation,” someone who might be “a meet yoke fellow.”  All the same, true passion also occupied the Puritan mind.  John Winthrop’s letters to his wife Margaret commonly ended with phrases such as “I kiss and love thee with the kindest affection” and “with the sweetest kisses and pure embracings of my kindest affection I rest Thine.”[2] Among the Puritan’s favorite theologians was Thomas Hooker, who compared the relation of husband and wife to that of Christ and the believer, and who called the ordinances of the Church “but the Lord’s love letters.”  Regarding the husband, Hooker wrote of him as a woman’s true soulmate:

The man whose heart is endeared to the woman he loves, he dreams of her in the night, hath her in his eye…when he awakes, museth on her as he sits at table, walks with her when he travels and parties with her in each place where he comes…. She lies in his Bosom, and his heart trusts in her, which forceth all to confess, that the stream of his affection, like a mighty current, runs with full Tide and strength.

Another favorite Puritan theologian, John Cotton, in a commentary on the Canticles, compared the worship of God in church to the marital love of husband and wife:

[The word delights] is an allusion to the marriage bed, which is the delights of the Bridegroom, and Bride.  This marriage-bed is the publick worship of God in the Congregation of the Church (as Can. 3.1).[3]

Alongside such emotional richness, Puritan marriages were also vital in the New World, where the respective skills of husband and wife—their common home economy—were necessary to survival in the agricultural settlements of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

The same focus on fruitful marriage could be found among the early backcountry Americans: also known as the hillbillies.  During the 18^th century, tens of thousands of Scots and Ulstermen left the British Isles to settle on the American frontier, particularly in the hill country of the Carolinas and Virginia.  Adherents to a strict Calvinism, the Scotch-Irish also carried with them a strong sense of marriage and family.  Writes historian Carl Bridenbaugh:

The conquest of the [American backcountry] was achieved by families….The fundamental social unit, the family, was preserved intact…in a transplanting and reshuffling of European folkways.[4]

Along with Calvinism, these backcountry Scotch-Irish also brought from the old country a distinct set of energetic wedding customs: the mock abduction of brides, often involving ritualized payments of a “body price” and an “honor price;” bidden marriages and bridewain; wild feasts fueled by homemade whiskey, reels, and jigs; the rituals surrounding the wedding chamber; and “the constant presence of Black Betty,” representing the sexual side of marriage.

And indeed, these frontier marriages were early and prolific.  In the South Carolina Upcountry of the 18^th Century, women married at the average age of 19; men at age 21.  This early marriage was apparently universal, too.  In one Carolina backcountry district with 17,000 inhabitants, there was not one woman at age 25 who was neither wife nor widow.  And the families were huge: eight, nine, or ten children per household was the norm.  As the Anglican missionary Charles Woodmason reported in the late 18^th Century:

There’s not a cabin but has ten or twelve young people in it…In many cabins you will see ten or fifteen children and grandchildren of one size and the mother looking as young as the daughter.[5]

On the frontier and its independent farms, which was how these Americans  lived, marriage and an abundance of children provided security and made good economic sense.  Faith, custom, and material realities converged around the wedded estate.

Ben Franklin understood this unique importance of marriage to America.  Europe had little surplus land and was filled with crowded urban areas, he noted.  Adults commonly avoided marriage until later in life.  But in America:

Land being thus Plenty…and so cheap as that a labouring Man, that understands Husbandry, can in a short Time save Money enough to purchase a Piece of new Land sufficient for a Plantation, whereon he may subsist a Family.

These new farmers were “not afraid to marry” for they could look ahead and see that their children when grown could be provided for as well.  Franklin concluded:

Hence marriages in America are more general, and more generally early, than in Europe.

And such marriages were fertile: eight births to each marriage in America, Franklin estimated, compared to an average of four in old Europe.  The true “Fathers of their Nation,” Franklin said in reference to the political leaders of his time, would be “The Cause of the Generation of Multitudes, by the Encouragement they afford to Marriage.”[6]

Writing in the early 1770’s, no less an observer than Adam Smith saw America’s culture of marriage as markedly different from that of Europe.  The Americans’ faith in progress and opportunity, the political economist stressed, found expression through a strong family life:

The most decisive mark of the prosperity of any country is the increase in its number of inhabitants….The value of children is the greatest of all encouragements to marriage.  We cannot, therefore, wonder that the people in America should generally marry very young.[7]

As historian Barry Shain, looking at the colonial American period, summarizes in his fine book, The Myth of American Individualism:

It appears that…most eighteenth-century Americans cannot be accurately characterized as predominantly individualistic….The vast majority of Americans lived voluntarily in morally demanding agricultural communities shaped by Reformed Protestant social and moral norms.  These communities were defined by overlapping circles of family— and community— assisted self-regulation and even self-denial.[8]

In these family-centered ways, the American colonies differed from Old Europe.  Remarkably, the American difference over marriage and marital fertility even transcended the lines of race and slavery.  As demographic historian Robert Wells reports in the journal Population Studies:

With regard to marriage and childbearing, black and white women in the South were more like each other than like English women by the second half of the eighteenth century.[9]

America’s unique bond to marriage continued into the next, or 19^th century.  The good home remained the icon of American self-understanding.  That justly famed French observer of American ways, Alexis de Tocqueville, so testifies.  Visiting here in the late 1820’s, Tocqueville found Americans unusually committed to strong and faithful marriages:

They [Americans] consider marriage as a covenant which is often onerous, but every condition of which the parties are strictly bound to fulfil [sic], because they knew all those conditions beforehand, and were perfectly free not to have contracted them.  The very circumstances which render matrimonial fidelity more obligatory, also renders it more easy.

This observation led Tocqueville to a more sweeping conclusion:

There is certainly no country in the world where the tie of marriage is more respected than in America, or where conjugal happiness is more highly or worthily appreciated….While the European endeavors to forget his domestic troubles by agitating society, the American derives from his own home that love of order which he afterwards carries with him into public affairs.[10]

Note his words here: Tocqueville held that it was in marriage that Americans crafted the necessary balance between liberty and order.  In any democracy, this is the most important of political tasks.  Unique in the world, it seems, the 19^th Century American found the answer in marriage, which transferred an ordered liberty from the home into public life.  It is not too much to say that, in Tocqueville’s view, the new Republic depended on marriage, rightly understood. 

All the same, it is true that in the early years of the 19^th Century, there had been signs that America was losing its sustaining virtues.  In 1810, Church membership and attendance were low and falling.  Per-capita alcohol consumption soared.  And so did the proportion of American brides already pregnant when coming to the altar, reaching 30 to 40 percent by 1810.[11]

America’s Second Great Awakening, a mass religious revival, came as a response.  Tocqueville, we can surmise, caught its spirit.  Between 1810 and 1860, there was a dramatic growth in religious participation, particularly among teens and young adults.  Formal church membership in America grew explosively, rising 250 percent during these years.  In the new climate of religious liberty, dozens of denominations now competed for the allegiance of young members.  And while these churches differed in terms of social class and liturgical style, they all affirmed that the regulation of individual morality through marriage and family was a central religious concern.

The results were quite stunning.  The proportion of American women who were pregnant at their marriage actually fell from about 35 percent in 1810 to 10 percent by 1850.  This was not the result of external laws.  Rather, it resulted from a renewed internal sanctity and the exercise of self control; and it shows that religious and family revival is both possible and a recurring part of American history.  As historians Daniel Scott Smith and Michael Hindus explain: “The sexual revolutionaries of the late eighteenth century, if the premarital procreators may be so labeled, were obviously not the vanguard of a sexually liberated nineteenth century.”[12]  

Instead, America witnessed the blossoming again of the Christian Home: a new vision captured in the  1869 book, The American Woman’s Home, co-authored by Catharine Beecher and Harriett Beecher Stowe.  These famous sisters described an ideal house church, which would also serve as a home school, with a steeple for a chimney and a movable screen to turn the parlor into a nave.  The marital couple also placed an organ in their home for hymn sings and samplers on the walls with favorite Bible verses and Gothic windows pointing toward heaven.  As historian Colleen McDannell explains, these homes—Protestant and Catholic alike—rested on pious marriages: 

Both the men and women of Victorian America perceived the sacrality of certain household objects.  Women might have made or purchased the objects—family Bibles, wax crosses, Angelus clocks—but popular literature often mentioned the objects’ emotional impact on men.[13]

And these homes remained strongly committed to children: marital fertility remained high until the end of the 19^th Century, particularly in the South and the Prairie states.  Images of the good home, the good marriage, and the primary commitment to children filled the new magazines that characterized the “Victorian Age” in America.

As the 20^th Century dawned, the importance of marriage to American life found reaffirmation.  That great advocate for distinctive American values, Theodore Roosevelt, stressed that in American civilization, marriage was “the most fundamental, the most important of all relations.”  He continued:

[I]n all the world there is no better and healthier home life, no finer factory of individual character, nothing more representative of what is best and most characteristic in American life, than that which exists in the higher type of family; and this higher type of family is to be found everywhere among us.[14]

For Americans, he wrote:

The primary work of the average man and the average woman—and of all exceptional men and women whose lives are to be really full and happy—must be the great primal work of home-making and home-keeping.[15]

The good marriage, Roosevelt emphasized, would be “a partnership of the soul, the spirit and the mind, no less than of the body.”  The “highest ideal” of the American family could be achieved “only where the father and mother stand to each other as lovers and friends,” and where “the partnership of happiness” would also be “a partnership of work.”[16]

This emphasis on marriage and the good home as defining American traits also surfaced as political and cultural leaders faced the challenge of mass immigration in the first two decades of the 20^th Century.  Over a million new immigrants arrived each year.  Compared to the existing population, this was almost three times the flow recorded in the 1990’s.  Most of these newcomers did not speak English, nor did they practice the Protestant faith, which had been the American norms.  How could they be assimilated into American life?

The answer, leading advocates concluded, was through a shared devotion to marriage and family.  The common denominator of American identity would be found in building the married-couple home, with husband/fathers seen as “breadwinners” and “homebuilders” and wives/mothers seen as “homemakers.”  As Frances Kellor, Director of Americanization Work for the Federal Bureau of Education, explained in 1918:

If we start with [marriage and] the family and work upward we get a sound city that will stand the strain of any crisis because its weakest links are strong.  Every great strain and burden eventually rests upon the family….Approached from the neighborhood and family and met squarely, the problem of Americanization can be solved adequately.[17]

This work took concrete form in the “Little Mothers Leagues” and the “Baby Saving” campaign organized by the U.S. Children’s Bureau in immigrant communities and through the “home economics” teachers funded by the Federal Smith-Lever Act of 1917.

However, these “American values” centered on marriage, home, and family once again showed signs of discord during the 1920’s.  A rebellion against supposed “repressive” sexual values set in.  Religion seemed to be losing its influences on American family life, symbolized by the ridicule heaped on the great evangelical lawyer and politician William Jennings Bryan during the Scopes “Monkey” Trial.  The “flapper” captured the youthful rebellion against supposed domestic constraints: short skirts; short hair; cigarettes; no marriage; no children.  Indeed, the marriage rate tumbled to an historic American low.  The total fertility rate among Americans fell from an average of nearly 4 children born per woman in 1890 to only 2 by 1933, for the first time in American history a figure below the generation replacement rate.

And yet, something extraordinary began to happen in the 1930’s.  In these years just before World War II, American marriage and fertility rates started to rise.  Church membership rolls also began climbing again; indeed, by 1950, nearly half of Americans were attending church or synagogue on any given weekend, a significant increase over the 1930 figure.  Moreover, the Protestant churches began once more to show a familistic spirit.  Back in 1931, the Federal Council of Churches—representing the so-called Protestant mainline—had broken faith with over a thousand years of Christian consensus and had endorsed family limitation through birth control.  In 1946, though, the FCC argued instead that “[f]or the individual family, there is nothing more satisfying, even though it may involve real sacrifice, than to have at least three or four children.”[18]

Evangelicals re-entered the public square in these years.  In 1949, the young preacher Billy Graham launched a three-week crusade in Los Angeles.  With the huge tent overflowing every night, the event extended to nine weeks, and captured national attention. 

The American marriage rate soared between 1932 and 1968, recreating a culture of marriage.  Just as during the 18^th century, marriage came early and became nearly universal.  And, just as in the 19^th century, a “liberated” sexuality was reigned in by religiously motivated self-control and by the married state.  The average age for first marriage fell to 20 for women and 22 for men, very close to the astonishing numbers found among the Carolina backwoodsmen of 1750.

This chart shows the mid-century American “marriage boom,” from a low in 1932, which is used as the base here, to a peak in the late 1940’s, showing strength as late as 1970, finally disappearing only in the 1980’s.   By the early 1960’s, over 95 percent of American women had married before age 40.  And the American birthrate climbed, too: from a total fertility rate of 2 children per woman in 1933 to 3.8 in 1957, an increase of 90 percent in less than 25 years.  Protestant Sunday schools were swarming with children again, and the greatest era of new church construction in American history commenced out in the child-rich suburbs.

The deeper revolution, though, may have been among American Catholics, an example with a lesson for us all.  Indeed, one might actually see the American “Marriage Boom” and the more famous “Baby Boom” as, statistically speaking, primarily “Catholic things,” symbolized here by the Robert Kennedy family of that era.  For example, in a survey conducted during the early 1950’s, only 10 percent of Catholics under age 40 had four or more children, very close to the 9 percent found among Protestants.  By the late 1950’s—a mere six years later—the Protestant figure was still 9 percent, but the number of large Catholic families had more than doubled, to 22 percent.[19]

More surprisingly, this surge in Catholic family creation in married-couple homes was most pronounced among Catholic women who had attended college, a development confounding a supposed law of sociology.  The commitment to large families was also concentrated among younger believers. Through 1965, each new age cohort of young Catholics was more pro-natalist than the group before.  In addition, more frequent attendance at Mass was related to early marriage and high fertility.

Why did this happen?  Part of the answer lies, I believe, with a then-unified Teaching Church which—from the Pope on down—focused on the holiness of family creation.  As Pope Pius XII told an audience in 1958: “Large families are most blessed by God and specially loved and prized by the church as its most precious treasures.”[20]  Part of the answer also lies with the new opportunities for early marriage and family creation that came as young Catholics poured out of urban ethnic ghettoes for the new homes on spacious lots in the burgeoning suburbs: a process that Benjamin Franklin had himself anticipated 200 years before.

Another part of the answer is that public policy intentionally and strongly reinforced marriage and childbearing in these years.  American conservatives commonly heap abuse on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.  Relative to strictly economic questions, this may be fair.  However, a close examination of this program shows that its social goals, at least, were to encourage more, earlier, and stronger marriages.  Every major New Deal program—from the National Industrial Recovery Act to the Works Progress Administration to the Social Security Amendments of 1939—each openly aimed at building traditional marriages and homes, resting on  “breadwinning” husbands and “homemaking” wives.  As one architect of the domestic New Deal, Molly Dewson, explained in arguing for homemakers and survivors benefits in Social Security:

[W]hen you begin to help the family to attain some security you are at the same time beginning to erect a National structure for the same purpose.  Through the well-being of the family, we create the well-being of The Nation.  Through our constructive contribution to the one, we help the other to flourish.[21]

Housing policy, also redesigned in the 1930’s, created mechanisms to provide subsidized Federal Housing Administration loans to young couples, which encouraged in turn early marriage and childbearing.  During the 1940’s, the U.S. Congress also redesigned the Federal Tax Code, introducing the marriage-friendly concept of “income splitting” and substantially increasing the value of the personal exemption.  These measures turned marriage, children, and a parent (usually the mother) full-time-at-home into valuable “tax shelters” for the average taxpaying household. 

In sum, religious renewal, America’s abundance of opportunity, and intentionally pro-family public policy proved to be a powerful and successful combination, together renewing the Nation.  Ordered liberty, resting on marriage, had found new expression.

Economic historian, and later National Security Advisor, Walt W. Rostow underscored the importance of this social renewal to American foreign policy, in his 1957 essay, “The American Style.”  The nation now confronted the world historical task of facing down Communism, an immense challenge.  And yet, Rostow drew hope from—of all things—“the birth rate increase” witnessed since the 1930’s.  Compared to old Europe, the America style also included “a narrower but perhaps more intense family,” “earlier marriages,…more children,” and strong churches and voluntary associations, which worked “to ramify and to weave a highly individualistic and mobile population into a firm social fabric.”[22]  Much like de Tocqueville, Rostow saw this nation’s commitment to marriage and family as vital to the success of American democracy.  As he wrote in the official U.S. “Basic National Security Policy” report for 1962:

The success of the whole [anti-communist] doctrine and strategy developed in this paper depends on the capacity of the U.S. to sustain a performance at home which reaches deeply into our domestic arrangements and which requires widespread…assumption of responsibility and sacrifice for public purposes by our people.”[23]

Without such grounding in a nation of decent and child-centered homes, Rostow believed, American national security policy would stumble and fail; and so it happened in the decade after 1965.

Indeed, starting in that portentous year, a culture-wide attack on the institution of marriage began.  Neo-Malthusians seeking population control; feminists seeking a “liberation” from traditional home life; sexual revolutionaries striving to tear down religious guides and restraints; and socialists seeking to eliminate all institutions standing between the individual and the state: all shared an interest in destroying this latest iteration of America’s unique culture of marriage.  Between 1965 and 1980, they largely had their way.  As The Playboy Press, in its “Official History of the Sex Revolution,” boasted as early as 1973:

Legions of Lolitas joined the battle [against American values]….Manners and morals and great institutions bit the dust….And when the air was cleared…the world was never going to be the same again.  No one knew exactly how, but Western Civilization had been caught with its pants down.

Appropriately, this book’s lead title was Rape of the A*P*E*, APE here meaning the American Puritan Ethic.  A subtitle—The Obscening of America—underscored the intentional nature of the enterprise, led by men “dirty-minded beyond belief.”  The Playboy Press concluded that this revolution had “removed America’s backbone” and had revealed our nation’s terrible secret:

Stripped of the Puritan ethic, we have no morals at all….[N]othing was reduced to less recognizable rubble than the revered Institution of Marriage.[24]

So sayeth The Playboy Press.

Well, if Benjamin Franklin, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Theodore Roosevelt were all correct regarding the special place of marriage in the building of The American Republic, then the Playboy Press is equally correct in underscoring how the assault on traditional marriage launched in the 1960’s and ‘70’s was also an assault on the very foundation of our Republic: “the revered Institution of Marriage.”  The changes might be summarized through the following numbers, comparing 1957—the height of the mid-20^th Century “Marriage Boom”—to the year 2000:

Here we see a sharp decline in the marriage rate (by about 43 percent), a retreat from marriage among both men and women, the near disappearance of early marriage, the weakening of the married-couple home as the normative American lifestyle, and a sharp fall in what one analyst calls “the marital product”—that is, children.

And not by coincidence, these were also the years of American retreat from the world symbolized by the Fall of Saigon to Communism and the Iranian hostage crisis.

However, despite claims of victory by the sexual left, and despite even the scenes from Massachusetts this week, a “culture of marriage” still survives in America.  We can, for example, find it among certain religious groups.  The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), as example, is the largest Protestant body in America, with 16 million members.  Its 1998 resolution on “the family” scandalized progressive opinion.  The SBC measure stated that “God has ordained the family as the foundational institution of human society”; that “Marriage is the uniting of one man and one woman in covenant commitment for a lifetime”; and, more controversially, that:

A husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the church.  He has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect and to lead his family.  A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.  She…has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation.

Recent data also shows that conservative Protestants who attend church weekly have stronger marriages and more children than the national average.  Some have even suggested that we may be on the cusp of, or already engaged in, another Great Awakening, where America’s reservoir of religious belief might refresh our culture again.

Meanwhile, another religious group, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—or The Mormons—have also shown a strong defiance of the spirit of the age and have nourished their own culture of marriage.  LDS leaders issued their Proclamation on the Family in 1995, declaring that:

The first commandment that God gave to Adam and Eve pertained to their potential parenthood as husband and wife.  We declare that God’s commandment for his children to multiply and replenish the earth remains in force….

The family is ordained of God.  Marriage between man and woman is essential to His eternal plan.  Children are entitled to birth within the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother who honor marital vows with complete fidelity.

Brigham Young University, now the nation’s largest independent institution of higher learning, expresses this spirit.  Expectations of early marriage and family creation are part of the campus atmosphere, physically expressed by the statuary on the campus grounds which features positive images of motherhood, fatherhood, children, and home.  In Utah, where LDS members constitute about 70 percent of the population, marital fertility rose between 1987 and 2000, to a figure nearly 50 percent above the U.S. average.

And America’s culture of marriage survives in another, most unexpected place: Hollywood.  What do the following films have in common?:

No, it’s not a Julia Roberts/Meg Ryan film festival.  My daughters call such films “chick flicks.”  But a better label might be “marriage flicks,” for all of them cast marriage as the great, satisfying, and truly fulfilling event in a woman’s life, and in a man’s life as well.  None of these films, let alone the whole genre, could have been made in cynical, libertine, post-marriage Old Europe.  Twenty-First Century Europeans do not believe in Cinderella anymore; Americans still do, despite the battering that marriage has taken in recent decades.  These films are distinctly our own: signs of a still-extant cultural yearning for marriage and home.

I tell this story to underscore the profoundly radical and destructive nature of the assault on marriage, now mounted under the labels, “freedom to marry” and “gay rights.”  These movements are not attempts to fulfill the promise of America.  Rather, they seek to undermine the very self-understanding of this nation, our identity as a people.  For you see, traditional, natural marriage forms the true American Way.  As Tocqueville found, marriage is necessary to, or the source of the unique balance between liberty and order that has defined and sustained our Republic.  It is a critical part of our unwritten constitution.  To tinker with marriage for ideological ends is to place the nation’s political order at grave risk.

And I also underscore my belief that America still has the religious and cultural reserves necessary to restore a culture of marriage, provided that public policy once again affirms and supports this traditional institution.  Our history offers earlier examples of renewal: the first half of the 19^th Century; and the middle decades of the 20^th Century.  A third Awakening is open to us, if religious leaders and political leaders perform their respective tasks with vision and courage.

Endnotes: