Transcript
Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking In Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Brad Wilcox is professor of Sociology and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. He holds the MA and PhD both in sociology from Princeton University. He is the author and co-author of many books and has written for journals such as The American Sociological Review and The Journal of Marriage and Family, but he’s also written for major media such as The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic and National Review. It is his most recent book, Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, that book’s the topic of our conversation today. Professor Wilcox, welcome to Thinking in Public.
Brad Wilcox:
It’s great to be here, Dr. Mohler.
Albert Mohler:
Look, I love your new book, and I’m proud to have a blurb on the back of it, by the way, and I really admire the way you’re making these arguments in the public square. But I want to step back for a moment and just ask you why this book at this time and how in the world did you get here in the year 2024?
Brad Wilcox:
Well, what I’ve been seeing in my work for the last 15 years is that we’re kind of discovering all the ways in which marriage matters for children, but at the same time, we’re kind of seeing that adults are kind of turning away from marriage and there’s kind of this been this precipitous decline in the marriage rate. And so got me thinking about the ways in which you need to think about the argument in terms of the value of marriage for men and women as adults. And so this book kind of pivots away from my work focusing on the impact of marriage on children and instead considers all the ways in which marriage matters for adult men and women today across the country.
Albert Mohler:
You are so good at amassing the statistical evidence and quite frankly, you’re head of a big research project on this. It’s just hard for me to imagine that that’s still a hard case to make. And I don’t mean that speaking as an evangelical Christian first of all, but I mean just as an observer of society; it would seem to be increasingly difficult to make the case that marriage doesn’t matter. So what is behind that?
Brad Wilcox:
I think that there are really kind of two fundamental challenges facing us when it comes to sort of this issue of marriage. And that is that plenty of folks have actually seen in their own lives, their parents have had difficult marriages gotten divorced, all that kind of stuff, or they’re having a real difficulty right now kind of finding the kind of person they think would be a good spouse. And so what I see among Christians, for instance, younger Christian leaders in my communities, that they can be reluctant to talk about the value of marriage in their own circles because they have students at the University of Virginia or young adults in their groups or even staff who feel like they have got no legitimate shot at marriage or who are some other issues kind of in play. And so I think both kind like the family of origin, peace for some adults or young adults and then kind the sense that it’s going to be really hard for me to find a spouse. These are two dynamics that I think have made people kind of inclined to either minimize sort of the importance of value of marriage or to believe the lie that marriage doesn’t matter and that all family forms are equally valuable. I’d also do that of course too in the broader culture that there still is kind of this progressive sense that every family form is equally valuable. And so we can’t kind of articulate or give credence to the notion that marriage matters today.
Albert Mohler:
As tempting as it would be to take that first, I’m going to discipline the conversation to take that a bit later. You set out to make the case in this particular moment for marriage, I mean the title of your book is Get Married, that’s about as clear as it gets, and you had to have a strategy for how you were going to lay this out, and behind that a massive research project. So I think it’d be great if you told us about the research and then your strategy in terms of how to approach the question in this book.
Brad Wilcox:
In terms of the research, basically I’ve done a lot of work on the impact of marriage and family on children. I had had that piece well in hand heading into this book project. But looking at all the ways in which marriage matters for adults, I wanted to think about different domains from happiness, to meaning, to loneliness—it would kind of hopefully be more convincing to people who would be skeptical about the value of marriage for adults—and then also tackle some of the myths that I think kind stand in the way of people understanding and appreciating the value of marriage. And so I talk in the book about the soulmate myth, which is this idea that marriage is primarily an emotional and romantic relationship. I talk about this sort of flying solo myth, this idea that people think that kind of living alone is the best way to live their best life and not having the encumbrances of a spouse and children, and then too, just talk about the family diversity in myth as well as a way of giving people a sense of how the left tends to think about family and marriage. And so giving people some of these myths that I think have some influence in the culture and then showing them empirically how they’re wrong, was the strategy that I took in the book.
Albert Mohler:
I have a wonderful team that helps to pull things together, and they pulled together your research and it’s three thick binders. You’ve been at this a long time and I mean, that’s your academic research. And so I want to see what’s behind the book. And so even in conversation just before we’re having this conversation, I’m looking at how you got here. Talk for a moment about the family or marriage as an issue of academic concern, because I think a lot of people would be kind of surprised to know how much work there is being done for good and for ill, by the way. But there’s an enormous amount of work. Again, you have produced inches upon inches of formal research reports here.
Brad Wilcox:
Sure. I think what’s important for people to realize is that there have been scholars working since the 1960s in economics, and psychology, and sociology to understand all the ways in which marriage affects the welfare of children and adults and even communities at large. And not every single piece of research would kind of line up exactly like we might expect or hope, but the vast majority of this research, I think, does align with what we’d expected to tell us. And the thinking here that I articulate in the book is indebted to some core what we call Durkheimian assumptions about the way in which marriage is providing a sort of a core sense of social order for our society, how it orders the lives of adults and kids. And I’m thinking particularly over the work of the Harvard anthropologist Joseph Heinrich in terms of orienting my work here, and he’s observed that marriage represents the keystone institution for most, though not all, societies and maybe the most primeval of human institutions.
And both his point and then the research, I’d say, in anthropology and older sociology, more generally thinks about the ways in which for civilization marriage organizes family life, promotes human flourishing, and maintains social order. And it does so by binding men to the kids that they father by stabilizing romantic relationships between women and men, by bridging the gender divide between women and men, and by endowing the lives of both women and men with a deeper sense of purpose and meaning and real solidarity. So for all of these reasons, marriage, I think particularly for civilizations, be they Christian or not, marriage is really the sort of most fundamental social institution that basically grounds civilizations across time and space. And that’s the big picture thing that I would talk about. And then obviously my work and the work of others kind of gives people empirical examples of the way in which, for instance, marriage promotes social order less crime, for instance, the flourishing of kids—boys, for instance, are much more likely to do well in school behaviorally, especially if they’re benefiting from a stably married family. And then two, I think now we’re seeing with adults is helpful in giving women and men’s lives a sense of meaning, direction on purpose that is crucial for their flourishing as well.
Albert Mohler:
Alright. You said one thing there about Heinrich, and I want to come back to it for a moment. You said most civilizations. I’d like to ask you just for a moment as just a personal issue. What are the contrary civilizations?
Brad Wilcox:
Those are his words, Dr. Mohler, and I’m not aware of a civilization—certainly if you look in the anthropological research—I’m aware of smaller cultures not as complex in their social organization that don’t rely upon the institution of marriage, but yet every complex civilization that I’m aware of, it’s dense, large, differentiated, tends to have, that I’ve seen, has marriage.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, it’s just interesting. Just a little background little thing here, I was in a conversation with someone similarly making the point and I just said, look, give me an example. And they said, Sparta. And I said, well, where do you think the boys come from? In other words, and who’s feeding them? In other words, that’s like a cartoon version of history.
Brad Wilcox:
Sure. Right. Yeah. And in terms of scale too, right, Sparta was impressive, but the scale was not…
Albert Mohler:
And didn’t end well,
Brad Wilcox:
Right? Well, of course that’s true for many… most civilizations obviously don’t end well, but a large complex society, I think, with substantial divisions of labor of one sort or another, seems like, from what I can see and what I’ve read, tends to have marriage as part and parcel of its social order.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Well, that’s very helpful and I appreciate the fact you’ve taken a turn in this book about the benefits of marriage to men and women, not just to children. And of course, I appreciate the fact you started with children because that’s most urgent, and by the way, making the front page of the national newspapers right now, because again, of the fall from the birth rate, it’s a civilizational crisis, that at least some people are awakening to. But turning to the benefits to men and women, you actually do have to assume some things in your definition of marriage here. And so by and large, you are just very clear about the fact that you’re talking about the benefits to men and women of the institution of marriage. How difficult is it to do this kind of research in the modern research university these days?
Brad Wilcox:
Well, I had a pretty difficult tenure battle more than a decade ago at the University of Virginia where there were people in my department, there was a dean, a different dean than we have today, and a committee advising her, that were all opposed to my getting tenure—and that’s the official status at a university, official job security, if you will. And so I had to respond to their concerns. I wrote a big appeal letter, and at the end of this process, the provost at the time at the University of Virginia, this is back in 2009, granted me tenure. And there was no clear rationale for what his thinking was, but I was able to turn the ship on this one and get tenure. But there was certainly, I think, people in my department at the time, many of whom are gone now and in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia, who were opposed to me getting some kind of position at UVA because my positions were more culturally conservative.
So there’s definitely, there’s a lot of talk about diversity in the American university today, but not a lot of real intellectual diversity and not a lot of tolerance for more conservative voices, especially socially conservative voices. So it is a challenge, but there are also, in fairness, plenty of scholars out there who are empirically minded, maybe more of an old school liberal kind of mentality, who are happy to have someone like me engaged in research, and writing, and arguments of one sort or another. So there are folks out there with whom I’m happy to work and do, but there are some people who have the view that a culturally conservative scholar is maybe kind of an oxymoron and don’t want people like me in the mix.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Well, we’re going to get to some of the big worldview clashes here soon enough, and eagerly enough, frankly. But just in terms of the research itself, to what extent is sociology still committed far more to an “is” than an “ought”? I mean, you go back to Auguste Comte, you go back to the beginning, it was a studied effort to try to separate this new science of human social behavior from any “ought”. Of course, the left can’t follow that rule either, but it’s really hard to talk about marriage without some kind of “ought.”
Brad Wilcox:
So I think sociology today is more likely to lean in a pretty progressive direction, influence, more why…
Albert Mohler:
Which it did in the beginning.
Brad Wilcox:
Yeah, that’s true, but there’s been a sort of clash between a kind of scientism and a kind of normative agenda that runs throughout our history. And I would say that right now it leans more in the direction of being implicitly about minimizing inequality and also maximizing the liberatory capacity of the human experience by calling into question any number of norms and values that have long guided many of our cultures and civilizations, and by trying to figure out ways to advance equality kind of broadly understood. So these are kind of the implicit normative assumptions that tend to guide the research and writing and teaching of many sociologists, but not all. And there are some, though we’re still kind of committed to a kind of a classic, either scientific agenda or Weberian perspective. I’m just trying to understand the way that the world works, that way in which our society functions.
Albert Mohler:
You are fairly well associated with certain arguments that I think are very helpful. And I want to say that upfront, and I just want to ask you to present a couple of these arguments. One of them is the success sequence. I think it’s one of the most helpful and simple fundamental ways of understanding the benefits of marriage.
Brad Wilcox:
So the success sequence is idea that if students, young adults get at least a high school degree, work full-time in their twenties and get married before having children, their odds of being poor just 3%, and their odds of reaching kind of the middle class or higher are 86%, kind of the bigger idea with the sequence is not so much as you do everything in a particular order that you understand that education, work and marriage are really fundamental pillars to the American experiment, American experience. And the young adults who kind of recognize that and act accordingly are much more likely to be flourishing actually both financially and then just otherwise emotionally and socially as well. So that’s kind of the point of the sequence. And we’ve gotten legislation passed in Utah that’s going to be kind of advising that this is taught in public schools in Utah and in the coming year in 2025, hoping to kind of bring that message to a number of states across the US from places like Alabama to Florida to Texas.
Albert Mohler:
I first heard that argument, not made by a sociologist, but by President Ronald Reagan. He made the argument using the same three issues you just used. And I think if I trace this, there’s a good chance he got that from Peter and Brigitte Berger, who had written about the family and we’re a part of the intellectual group, especially Neoconservatives, who were speaking into the Reagan administration. But when I heard it, I thought as a Christian, as a pastor, as a Christian minister and theologian, I hear that and I want to say, okay, that’s just a beautiful demonstration of common grace. And this success sequence in one sense has, I think we can argue marked different civilizations when they didn’t have high school, but nonetheless, in other words, there were phases of life and the success of the civilization was in moving young people, young men and young women into marriage and into, frankly, parenthood as smoothly and as quickly as possible.
Brad Wilcox:
Yeah, no, I think that’s true that most civilizations have a real recognition at a cultural, even formal level, that education, work and family are fundamental. We certainly see the success sequence has been part and parcel of many East Asian cultures in recent decades. So this is a pretty common pattern across many different civilizations as you just noted. Yes.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Well, the old Victorian British system was just—for boys, for example, in the middle class, which is more wealthy than the American middle class back in that definition—but that a boy would go to a grammar school and then would go to prep school, we might call it, and then would serve in the military and then would assume full adult responsibilities assuming marriage and parenthood and all the rest. And so the period between, say 20 and 30 few men had acquired all those things at 20, but few hadn’t at 30.
Brad Wilcox:
And the challenge right now, as you know, is sort of the median age of first marriage for young men today is around 30 and it’s inching upwards. And we’re also projecting today that probably one in three young adults today will never marry including men. So the median age of first marriage is in some ways kind of deceptive for us today because there will be so many young adults who are never even going to touch the institution in ways that are going to be, I think, enormously destructive for them.
Albert Mohler:
And when you look at that, I mean, it’s frankly something that boggles the mind when you think about some of the statistics. It can be very confusing, for example, and you do mention this in your book, but when you talk about a snapshot of the American population who is and is not married, I mean, one of the reasons that the rate of marriage or the number of marriages, frankly, has gone down is because it’s not that people won’t ever get married, but they’re delaying it. So that actually at any given time kind of messes up the numbers in a comparative sequence.
Brad Wilcox:
That’s true, but we have kind of these sort of life course charts that we can do in sociology and demography and other, and they kind can tell us what’s the pattern that you would anticipate for when someone hits 40 or 45? And at that point, if you haven’t had kids or haven’t gotten married, your odds of doing so are still comparatively quite low. And right now…
Albert Mohler:
I understand that, but we used to have a normative situation in which someone at 25 is married, now it’s more normative not, and that is a big statistical aberration.
Brad Wilcox:
Yes, that is definitely correct.
Albert Mohler:
You mentioned something also very controversial, not just the success sequence. You actually make clear that marriage is uniquely helpful to both men and women, both in terms of where they have the same needs, but also where they have very different needs. And so I would like you to kind of spell that out a bit, and then I want to ask you about the academic response to any kind of argument along those lines.
Brad Wilcox:
Yeah, so in my chapter on gender, I suggest that there’s a lot of overlap. I mean, I find for instance, there’s a book on love and respect in marriage that sort of circulates in the Christian world. And when you look at kind of the correlations between marital happiness for both women and men, you find that they’re both correlated with love and respect. So both women and men benefit from having love and respect in their marriage, but I do find that the love factor a bit stronger for women and respect factors a bit stronger for men. And the correlations that I did in the YouGov dataset that I fielded for this particular book project, I also find too in my chapter on gender, that men are more likely to prioritize regular sexual intimacy compared to women, and that women it looks like are more likely to prioritize valuing breadwinning and physical strength more than men would.
So these are things that I’m not especially surprising to your audience, but they do kind of push back at this idea that women and men experience marriage and love and relationships in much the same way. And so again, in the chapter in general, I’m just trying to suggest that there are certain ways in which even in 2024, women and men experience love and marriage and family life in distinct ways. A lot’s changed, but there are some kind of common threads that run I think across time and space here that do suggest sex differences that are meaningful. And again, they are kind of expressed in my chapter on gender in the book. Now, in terms of the response, I haven’t gotten, I’m not superstitious and I don’t have a computer, so if I’m knocking on my computer, I’m not meant to be. But I haven’t gotten a lot of pushback yet against the book.
I’m sure that there are some coming, but surprisingly, I have not gotten a lot of pushback so far against the book. And I don’t know why that’s the case. Normally my work does get a lot of pushback, but I think at least a lot of the book’s findings about the value of marriage for men, women, children, and the broader common wheel are just not, you can’t really object to them. The science is so strong. I think the biggest objection there is just this idea we call selection effects, and that’s the kinds of people who select into marriage and family are different, distinct in ways that would account for why they’re better off financially or better off emotionally. That’s I think, the biggest critique of my book. But in the main, a lot of the results that I’m sharing are ones that any scientist with access to data based upon human beings would have to acknowledge that the findings are consistent with what we tend to see in the research on these kinds of topics.
Albert Mohler:
This is where I tend to see a disconnect. And you’ve accomplished something really important here in a book I would describe as kind of a bridge, a bridge between the research and a more popular readership. And your book is obviously directed to people who believe that there is a problem with marriage and are looking for solid, thoughtful, responsible material including research and analysis about how to think about the problem these days. But as I look at this, I see an honesty in a lot of the academic research I don’t see in the popular conversation. And so you see this disconnect between what people believe they’re supposed to say about marriage, and yet what their own research is demonstrating. And so what I find is you have these second and third level arguments, which is yes, but that’s simply the result of continuing patriarchal prejudice and patterns. So in other words, yes, it might be that that functions better now, but we’re looking forward to a brave new world in which that wouldn’t matter anymore.
Brad Wilcox:
There is a kind of utopianism that can guide and govern a lot of the academic work, even the preaching and teaching in some precincts of the church and the media and social media too, where if you do find, for instance, that some traditional pattern is linked to say women being happy in their marriages. And so in my book, for instance, talk about women are happier when they’re married to men who are more ambitious, women are happy when they’re married to men who are stronger, women are happier to men who they rate as good breadwinners, women are happier. And this is interesting, especially women to men that they describe as protective. I think this is protective, both kind in a physical way, but also kind of even in other ways that they might be at a party and their husband’s looking out for them, making sure that they’re flourishing in the party, for instance.
So that’s the kind of thing that my book reports, and I think that these are patterns that you would see in most cultures and context. And so I think that suggests that this is not simply, lifeline is not simply the manifestation of some kind of residual patriarchal influence from Christianity or from the West or some other kind of cultural current that is still washing over our society. I think that there are some basic features to human nature that are linked to how women and men experience the world and that they’re manifested in marriage and family in ways that my book picks up on today.
Albert Mohler:
You used a phrase there, I think absolutely accurately, but it’s a phrase I find less common in the literature these days. You said human nature. I find an antagonism toward that very concept in much of the academic literature these days. There is no human nature.
Brad Wilcox:
I certainly think that there are lots of scholars who think that social life is completely constructed, but I do think that there are others, and I mentioned Joseph Heinrich at Harvard for instance, Tyler VanderWeele at Harvard as well, Nicholas Christakis at Yale. I mean, there are some notable scholars out there, for instance, Carole Hoovan who was at Harvard’s now at the American Enterprise Institute, who I think do have some appreciation for the way in which biology has a role to play in all this. And so they would kind of, I think, grant this idea that there is something like what you and I have described as human nature that is not completely malleable, and that if you organize a culture, a society, a civilization around an appreciation for these fundamental features of human nature, people are more likely to flourish. But definitely a minority in terms of people who are willing to speak clearly and openly about their sense that there is a real human nature out there.
Albert Mohler:
Your book, in terms of the research is bracing, it’s encouraging, it’s discouraging at points. But I guess one of the questions I have is when you have, say a young couple, a man and a woman who get married, they have children and they’re really trying to live out the success sequence, you talk about whether they name it or not, where are young people finding models these days? Because they’re coming to adulthood in such massive cultural confusion and sometimes from family confusion in their own history.
Brad Wilcox:
So what I would say is we have to think about this in both kind of in structural terms and cultural terms. And so by structure, I would sort of think about the class structure in American life. And so I think for upper middle classing adults, they still have an often implicitly lived out model in their own homes. So when I teach my classes at UVA, I mentioned this in my piece for the Atlantic, about 80% of the students are coming from intact biological, married families, even though only about half of kids in the US as a whole have the benefit of an intact biological married family. And most of the kids that I speak to or teach at UVA are coming from relatively well-educated and more affluent families as well. And so they have a model, Dr. Mohler, in their homes that incorporates practically, education, work, marriage.
And so the sequence has been lived out for them. It’s kind of the expectation. In fact, I actually quizzed my students about a third of the way into a class, and I have these anonymous platforms, I can quiz them on, and I’ll say, do you think it’s wrong for a woman to have a child outside of marriage? About 65% will say, no, it’s not wrong. And then I’ll say, if you came home at Thanksgiving break and told your parents that either you were expecting a child outside of marriage or your girlfriend was, would they freak out? And like 97 or 99% of the students, depending upon the semester will say, yeah, their parents would freak out. And then I asked them about, do you expect the success sequence to govern your own approach to life? And about 97% of them say that they expect that it’s going to.
So the point is that I think for upper middle class Americans, even ones who are more progressive in their thinking, they’ve seen the sequence lived out, they expect to live it out themselves. That’s part of the response. But I think there are other, obviously cultural resources too. The church is one. And then also I think they get kind of this message in some more conservative platforms these days, whether it’s on some kind of podcast or YouTube video, so they can get this message about the importance of marriage, especially in other kind of cultural contexts, conservative context as well.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, and I would say as a Christian, I think there’s an inherent attraction to it that catches attention. And that leads me to another issue you address in the book. And I’ll just say as background, something like 30 years ago, I was invited to participate in an academic meeting at a think tank right there on Capitol Hill. And it was a week after a presidential election in the United States and a very contested one, big issues, all the culture issues out there, and the voting pattern on Capitol Hill was just radically in a liberal direction. I mean, you can get the numbers, and the Washington Post had them all listed. So we had a meal break, and I happened to walk to a park and just was grabbing something to eat. And I looked and I saw Norman Rockwell’s America. I mean, it was as conventional as any picture you could see in say, Southern Mississippi, it’s West Texas.
It’s the same picture. And so I came back and I wrote an article on liberal theory conservative lives, which I said, I think these folks vote very liberal, but they’re not raising their 4-year-old and their 8-year-old really liberal. There’s a conventionality here. You document this I think in two or three important places in your book. And I like the way you put it at one point where you say it’s liberal talk and conservative walk. So there are an awful, a lot of people who are ideologically and politically undermining conditions that lead to family security and marital happiness and that kind of flourishing, but they live very conventional lives.
Brad Wilcox:
And I talk in the book about Reed Hastings at Netflix and give an example of some of his products at Netflix are not very family friendly, and yet he himself has navigated some marital difficulties, been married for more than 30 years, and and his wife and their two kids obviously are benefiting from that on many levels. I can think of, there’s a billionaire who owns, I think it’s Warner Brothers records, who has a very conventional marriage and family life from what I can tell online. And yet some of his offerings musically speaking are, shall we say, not at all kind of family friendly. So we can multiple examples, but the point obviously you’re getting at is that many elites either take liberal positions in public or they’re profiting off of products, technological or cultural, that undercut marriage and family. And yet in their own private lives, they’re very conventional. I think in part because it’s prudent, it just makes more sense financially. Your kids are going to go to the right college if you can keep it all together. And the tragedy of those, I’d like those elites to do a better job of actually aligning their own private lives with their public policies, their corporate products, and their public rhetoric.
Albert Mohler:
Well, you cite in the book the most glaring example of this, and that was Steve Jobs, who famously was the advocate for the iPad, but said, when he was asked, that his kids weren’t ever going to have one.
Brad Wilcox:
Exactly.
Albert Mohler:
That’s a very revealing statement.
Brad Wilcox:
The Silicon Valley has lots of folks like this too, who are, again, they’re profiting off of things happening on YouTube or Microsoft, Xbox. They’re basically exercising a corrosive role among our, in terms of social media, our girls, and in terms of gaming our boys. But I’m sure they protect their own kids from spending too much time on the Xbox or on Insta.
Albert Mohler:
Or at the very least, they’re monitoring all of this, and they are constantly monitoring the health and flourishing of their children. And if they see a problem, they will fix it. They may hire an expert for help, but they’re going to fix it.
Brad Wilcox:
Yeah, that’s right. Definitely.
Albert Mohler:
A part of this leads me to a discussion. So I’ll just say as a theologian with a sociologist, so let’s just take this opportunity. So there are some sociologists that would argue, “Well, yeah, but that conventionality is based in social capital. It’s based not in any moral principle, but just in certain sociological principles that people of certain abilities, certain cultural status, certain economic opportunity they will take. But there’s no right or wrong here. This is simply learning to play the game in accumulating social capital.” Now, as a theologian, I want to say you can make that argument all you want. I believe that it reflects creation order, but I don’t believe that it’s refutable. And so what gets me is regardless of whether you want to see it as creation order or you want to see it as just the cultural script, how in the world do people still try to make the argument that you can just defy the cultural script and have what we all want in terms of human flourishing?
Brad Wilcox:
Yeah, I think the proponents of radically either alternative family forms or having a more laissez-faire approach to family life, I think tend to be often unaware of the more sophisticated research. And they would assume too, when it comes to family and child and adult outcomes, and they would assume too, if they’re aware of their correlation between say, marriage and some good outcome for kids or adults, that this is really just kind of like a manifestation of some deeper underlying realities related to things like more education or more affluence. And so the argument that people on the left will often make in terms of the acknowledging that there’s some benefit to the say that the two parent married family’s just that, well, it’s just a correlation. It’s not causal. And what’s really happening here is that the kinds of people who have access to lots of money and lots of economic opportunities and good educations, and maybe even if they’re really kind of going deep, some kind of cultural conventions that are helpful, these are the things that explain why people who are near it are more prosperous and happier and less prone to suicide, for instance.
So that’s kind of the argument. I think that it’s a lot of, and oftentimes, a kind of wish casting that is sort of shaping how they’re thinking about these questions.
Albert Mohler:
Our society was kind of mesmerized at the headline level with the controversy and scandal having to do with several universities where you had athletic agents basically fraudulently getting kids of privilege with the enormous amount of financial incentives onto all kinds of athletic teams, including rather arcane sports, where that was just how they were gaming to get their kid into Princeton or USC or whatever. And I was thinking of that and thinking of our conversation when just a few months ago, I was in a situation in which admissions to Ivy League universities came up and there was an Ivy League professor there, and he said, well, the fact is that the left fixated on the quantitative analysis of the SAT and the ACT scores and said, that reflects coaching that wealthy parents and intact families can arrange and it’s discriminatory. So we’re going to do without that and we’re going to give more emphasis to the essay. And he said, but, and this is one of the reasons why some of those same universities now turning back to the quantitative analysis is that they made the situation worse because now you have an essay and this kid writes, I spent 30 days with my family cruising the South Pacific doing social work. And it turns out, that turns out to greater social inequality, not lesser.
Brad Wilcox:
Right, so think when it comes to American higher education, we do see a dynamic where, yeah, it’s the kids who are living more privileged lives who often have help with their essays. Also too, I think there’s been some, I mean, I’m seeing a tremendous increase in the number of kids who are getting what are called stack accommodations. Some accommodation take more time the test or paper. And those tend to be, oftentimes those diagnoses tend to be very expensive to get from a psychologist or some other kind of professional.
Albert Mohler:
That’s interesting.
Brad Wilcox:
So I wonder if kids who are more privileged financially are actually benefiting from this more than kids who are coming from working class and poor backgrounds. But yeah, there’s no question that a lot of these tests, the SATs and whatnot are less easy to gain than this whole series of essays that a lot of colleges are looking for in the admissions process today.
Albert Mohler:
I want to shift to talk about the larger context. I’ve been fascinated by these issues for decades and have tried to follow them as closely as I can and understand as much as I can. And when I was first coming into adult life and as a theologian, academic, and someone very concerned about society trying to figure these things out, you had, for instance, the Moynihan report in the background, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, later United States Senator on the black family is how it was presented, and you had all the cultural tumult of the sixties and seventies, and you did have a conservative reaction. And I would put the Bergers in that category and several others who were doing this kind of research. And so at that point, I’m now reading it as it comes out. So I’m watching these conversations emerge. And so there’s a sense in which I want to say that what you’re doing is a 21st century form of making an argument that Daniel Patrick Moynihan was making in sociological terms back in the 1960s and that the Bergers were making in the 1970s. But I want to go to a period in the eighties and the nineties in particular, maybe even the first decade of the century, when frankly, there were some of the most radical arguments imaginable that were being made, and they got a lot of attention. You mentioned one person, Stephanie Coontz in your book.
I ended up in one studio, television studio with her debating some of these issues some years ago. I actually came to the conclusion she means what she says. In other words, I don’t think she was posing. The relativity, the family that she celebrated, I went back because of the conversation with you today, I went back to look at some of her work. Has anyone pointed out that it didn’t turn out like she said? Because I mean, she makes some pretty bold statements that just don’t turn out to be true. How does that work in sociology these days?
Brad Wilcox:
Yeah, I mean, I do critique her work in my book, and one of the assumptions that she makes is I think that we’re kind of heading in the arc of history. This whole idea that progressive often happens, things are moving inexorably to a better place basically. And that, for instance, an egalitarian or androgynous kind of family order is going to be necessarily the best one, or which is one of her messages in her work. And then another message that she conveys is that when the marital bond is more contingent, is less secure in a sense, and people are not as hung up about getting divorced, then marital happiness should be increasing because all the bad marriages that thought here are going to be cleared out of the way. And yet as we look at the trends in the 1970s, for instance, in that latter point, what we see is that in fact, marital quality fell even as divorce was rising.
And so you would think by her logic, if you’re getting rid of all the bad marriages, you would think that the remaining marriages would be kind of just registering those top marital happiness scores. And that was not what was happening. I think that’s because she didn’t anticipate the ways in which if people have the sense that their marriages are fundamentally insecure and that their friends and relatives are divorcing willy-nilly, it’s going to make you more, I think worried about the prospects that you have for your own marriage. And that’s going to be, I think, kind of corrosive when it comes to marital quality. So yeah, I don’t think there’s been a recognition on her part or the part of many progressives that a lot of their assumptions about the trajectory of marriage and family life or not going to be realized. One more point though on this, and that is that I was raised a mainline Protestant in the Episcopal church, and at that point when I was growing up in the eighties and nineties, I think mainline Protestant voices, both in the kind of broader religious world and the public square, were kind of more prominent because they had a social platform from which to speak, the mainline protestants,
Albert Mohler:
And there were still quite a few of them.
Brad Wilcox:
Exactly. Right. The point is that nowadays mainline Protestant theologians and public intellectuals have a much weaker platform because they’re not speaking for a large group of people in American life today.
Albert Mohler:
Well, they’ve also moved far further to the left. I mean, you look at the publishing houses of mainline Protestantism. I mean, Peter Berger couldn’t possibly be published these days, and he was published, I think by one point, Beacon Press.
Brad Wilcox:
Sure. But my point is that they’re less central to the American public conversation today because they don’t speak for a large group of people anymore. And the same thing is going to be true in say, 10 years from now when it comes to sort of, I mean, Stephanie Coontz is a very good, rich, historically thoughtful, provocative book on the history of marriage, and there’s a lot in there that’s great. But I think there’s a lot of stuff too that I would disagree with. But my point is that I think voices like hers are going to be a lot less central to the conversations about marriage and family in a decade from now, because for both better and for worse, people who are clearly on the left, like she is, are going to be much less likely in a decade to be married with kids and to have—there’s going to be less of an audience.
So people are writing about being single or having polycules or whatever else is going to be going on in 10 years from now. Yes, they’ll have a natural kind of position from the academy and from the media for people who take a very progressive view in all these things, but for people who are really thinking and writing about marriage and family per se, my hypothesis is that in a decade or so, they’re going to be like mainline Protestants today when it comes to theology and public life because they’re just not going to be that many on the left who are really thinking and writing and working in the marriage and family space in a decade from now.
Albert Mohler:
So since the time you have written this manuscript, even in the last few days, new reporting has come out on the birth rate in the United States, and I think it slipped from what you documented in your book at 1.6 to in the most recent report, 1.4. It made the headlines again of the newspapers just in the last few days, and many of us have been trying to talk about this for decades. But let me just ask you, is the very context of marriage and family, is it going to be increasingly restricted to an elite producing children over against a larger population that’s just basically sterile?
Brad Wilcox:
So when I see the trends, we’re certainly seeing marriage declining and fertility declining, in part because marriage is declining, and even today marriage is the most likely to produce more kids than alternatives. So basically I envision a world where more educated, more affluent Americans, but also more religious Americans and more conservative Americans are going to be disproportionately getting married and having children, and Americans who are poor, who are working class, but also Americans who are more secular and more left-leaning are going to be less likely to be getting married and having children, especially when it comes to the marriage piece. I think we’re going to see working class, poor, secular, and progressive Americans a lot less likely to get married. So, I think we’re going to see the whole family enterprise being much more selective. And so the good news there is that I think our kids are going to be more likely to be raised in say, married homes going forward. But the bad news there is that many adults I think are not going to have the joy of getting married and of holding an infant in their arms who is their son or daughter.
Albert Mohler:
Or grandson and granddaughter.
Brad Wilcox:
Correct. Yes.
Albert Mohler:
Something else in your book, and I want to talk about this because this is the part that might aggravate some of the folks who will, like other parts of your book, you actually make some political proposals. And one of the things you indict is that the market actually can be very corrosive of marriage and very corrosive of the family. In particular, you look at economic changes in the United States that have led to unemployment, underemployment. And so in my lifetime, one of the shocking things that’s developed is that the family solidarity that would once have marked, say Western Appalachia and the middle class in much of Northern America, Midwestern America, is being hollowed out by the fact that so many men don’t have jobs.
Brad Wilcox:
So I talk in the book about the China trade shock, and there’s other bits of research out there, actually lots of research out there on kind of the impacts of both free trade and automation on working class men and their families across the US and many different communities around our country. So that’s certainly, I think part of the problem that has played out in the last couple of decades, that it’s undercut the strengths and stability of working class family life in the United States. I think another piece of that’s newer, and that is just sort of the impact of what I call electronic opiates. And I’m thinking here of social media and I’m thinking here of gaming as well, and as we think about the near term future, AI companions are going to be, I think, a big challenge here as well. And the idea here is that the technology is getting so powerful that our young adults are teenagers, and of course many adult women and men too, are kind of so distracted by devices and by one form of entertainment or another that they’re kind of losing the capacity to socialize, date—and have good relationships If they’re married—and less inclined to go ahead and have kids as well.
So I think that’s a way in which our contemporary economy is exercising a kind of corrosive role. I mean, you think about policies that would minimize the power and reach not just of, well among the things, big tech because of this.
Albert Mohler:
And I think naming what we’re up against is really important here. On this program, I try to introduce Christians, thinking Christians, reading Christians to not only books, but to authors and come back again and again to some authors who would keep turning out just really important books as you do. I would say that this is a book, and I don’t always talk this way on the program, but I would say this is a book that Christian pastors should read. It would be very beneficial to Christian pastors, to all reading intelligent Christians just thinking about the issues we face, including the cultural and political landscape. Economic landscape as well. But I raised this in order to say I really had a sense, regardless of whether it’s your intention or not, and I think it just is something I want to say, and that is I think your book would be particularly important for Christian parents thinking about raising children for marriage. It really struck me that that, I think, is one of the greatest contributions this book could make would be to encourage Christian parents to help to organize their families, and frankly, to raise their children to get married and flourish in marriage.
Brad Wilcox:
Well, thank you. I appreciate that. And we have seen, even in my students at UV, I’ve got students who are coming from Christian homes and they’re still getting a message from their parents. They should wait till about 28 or 29 or 30 to get serious about getting married. And I’m like, I don’t think they realize that it’s just harder out there today for our young adults to find decent people to date. And so I think if for no other reason than just having a greater confidence that your daughter or your son will marry someone, opening them up to the possibility they could meet someone at UVA would be a great candidate for marriage. And so I certainly think that among other things, Christian parents should be more cognizant of the importance of stressing to their teenagers and young adults, the value of marriage vis-a-vis education career. That’s right. And then also the value of getting married in your twenties. If you can find someone who’s good provided that they are a good friend to your child, that they have lots of virtues, and especially that ideally that they are, share a common faith with your son or daughter as well.
Albert Mohler:
And as a Christian speaking to Christians, I would put that far more stridently and strongly, but by common grace is extended to others also with the benefit. Brad, I want to say my wife and I have been married more than 40 years, and we got married in our early twenties as early as we could, and I don’t think we own anything we don’t own in common. And at a certain point, all of our relationships are common relationships, all of them. And if they’re not, they’re about to be. Where Mary meets someone. I meet someone, the next thing you know, the work relationship, church relationship, and it’s just such a thick system by God’s grace of marriage; I work with so many young people and this campus is full of them, and by the way, they’re getting married real early from what I can tell. It becomes real evident when you look out at the lawn and see all the strollers. It’s just God’s glory. It makes me so happy. But I just want to say to people, I think blending two lives, it’s not impossible later in life, it’s certainly though, more complicated.
Brad Wilcox:
Yes. No, I think there’s a way in which young adults who get married in their twenties can form a common identity as a couple and a family that’s easier for them to navigate. And then when you’re getting married in your thirties, you’ve got kind one bachelor and one bachelorette, and it’s a little bit harder to bring those two independent 30 something adults together.
Albert Mohler:
Still want them to do it and want to encourage them and build every support system we can for them, but I appreciate your candor in this research. I have to say that again, I appreciate the book so much, but I am always eager to ask, what are you working on now?
Brad Wilcox:
So I think the main thing I’m working on right now is an effort to kind of bring our message to a couple of states on the success sequence, and then also we’ve got a housing agenda. We’re trying to make it easier for younger couples to afford to buy a home and start a family. Then the other thing is really trying to figure out with another female colleague how women are affected by marriage and motherhood, because a lot of surveys today are telling us that women are deeply—young women, especially—deeply skeptical about marriage and motherhood. So I want to kind of just explore that issue of women, marriage, and motherhood in more detail to kind of, with a female scholar, to kind of give them a sense of what the research tells us about, not just the big headlines which are in my book, but sort of the more granular character of how it is that motherhood and marriage are meaningful and valuable for young women today.
Albert Mohler:
Well, as always, I appreciate the conversation. Professor Brad Wilcox, thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public.
Brad Wilcox:
It’s my pleasure, Dr. Mohler.
Albert Mohler:
Many thanks to my guest, professor Brad Wilcox for thinking with me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you will find more than 200 of these conversations at albertmoler.com under the tab, Thinking in Public. For information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com. Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public, and until next time, keep thinking.