Wednesday, March 26, 2025

Part I

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The Marriage Challenge Has Become a Marriage Crisis: American Women are Increasingly Not Getting Married – And Are Increasingly Rejecting the Idea of Marriage

When we are seeking to think faithfully in terms of dealing with the issues of the day through a Christian worldview, one of the things we have to understand is relative weight or relative priority. What’s the most urgent issue?

One of the lessons we need to learn, one of the principles by which we need to operate is that when something gets close to creation order, it becomes more important. The closer to creation order, the greater the urgency, or to put it another way, when you have a crisis in creation order, you have a crisis in every dimension of human life. This is an urgent crisis.

Now every once in a while, a headline passes by and you recognize, “Now wait just a minute. This is a five-alarm fire.” Here’s the headline. It’s from the review section of the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal. Here’s the headline, “American Women Are Giving Up on Marriage.”

Now in journalism, you’re looking at headlines as being sometimes overblown. That’s just the fact of life. Especially in the day of more sensational journalism, headlines will be offered in order to entice you into the story. You know, “Alien Ship Attacks New York City” or something only to find out it was something very different. But in this case, we’re not talking about science fiction. We’re not talking about some kind of sensationalism. It really is very difficult to imagine how you could exaggerate the problem of American women giving up on marriage.

So there’s the headline. So what’s behind it? First of all, the story is by Rachel Wolfe and the subhead on the article says this, “Major demographic shifts have put men and women on divergent paths. That’s left more women resigned to being single. The numbers aren’t netting out.” That’s a quote, “The numbers aren’t netting out.”

So let’s talk about the numbers. The Wall Street Journal tells us, “The share of women ages 18 to 40 who are single, that is neither married nor cohabitating with a partner was 51%, 51.4% in 2023. According to an analysis of census data by the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, that is up from 41.8% in 2000.”

That’s a radical increase. That’s an almost 10% increase in just a short amount of time in the number of women in that age cohort. It’s very crucial. The age cohort here is age 18 to 40 who are not married, aren’t close to being married, and evidently aren’t moving towards getting married. That’s more than half. Just to do the math again, 51.4% is more than half.

This is a five-alarm fire. This is a huge thing. And frankly, this headline doesn’t come out of the blue. Many of us watching these things have understood that marriage has been in decline across the American population for a matter of decades now. The age of first marriage has been extended further and further out into the future. We’re now looking somewhere at about age 30 for both men and women. It had been at about age 20, just closer to 20 if you go back, say a half century.

So you can say, “Well, what difference does it make if someone gets married closer to 30 than to 20?” Well, it makes a lot of difference over the marriage cycle. It makes a lot of difference in terms, for instance, of having children. How many children you will have. What the expectation is. What’s the model of marriage? It turns out that that has a lot to do with it.

Now, Rachel Wolfe in covering this story goes on to tell us that it’s not clear that a lot of the women who aren’t married don’t want to be married, but it is increasingly clear that they don’t think they’re going to get married. Many of them are basically moving into some kind of permanent singleness as a lifestyle. They’re making economic decisions about say, buying real estate, buying homes, looking at making their own plans for travel and life and everything else. They are planning not to be wives, not to be married, to be outside of marriage as an institution.

Furthermore, this article tells us that among many younger women in the United States, the unmarried women at least think themselves happier than the married women. Now, I’m not saying they are happier. I’m not saying that the married women say they’re less happy than the unmarried women. I’m saying it’s interesting that the unmarried women, at least an increasing percentage of them say that they think married women are not so happy, and that tells us something about the transformation of social expectation, personal expectation.

What is the expectation of a young woman? Is it to be married and to find fulfillment in marriage or is it as a project of being single that is just going to continue being single? At the end of the article, by the way, it becomes clear and we’ve seen this phenomenon, that an increased percentage of young women who don’t plan to get married, they’re not saying they don’t intend to become moms.

Now it’s a subset here, but there is a growing subset of women who don’t intend to be married, but do intend to be mothers one way or another. They’re separating motherhood from marriage. They’re separating child-rearing from the context of the two-parent family. And so far as they’re concerned, this could well be just a permanent reality.

As Rachel Wolfe writes, “American women have never been this resigned to staying single. They are responding to major demographic shifts, including huge and growing gender gaps in economic and educational attainment, political affiliation and beliefs about what a family should look like.” Now that’s a very powerful paragraph. I think it’s true, but I think we need to dissect it just a bit.

Number one, we are told that this is a demographic trend, or at least a response to major demographic trends. First, including large and growing gender gaps in economic and educational attainment. Okay, is there such a gap? Yes, there is. The closer you look, the greater the gap, particularly when it comes to say, college education, educational attainment.

The fact is that the entering class of a lot of colleges and universities these days is about 70% women, or at least close to 70% women, and thus about 30% young men. Young men are struggling. It’s really clear they are struggling at least when it comes to the transition into adulthood, the transition in educational attainment towards college.

And it isn’t true that you have to have a college degree in order to get a good job in this country, but it is true that it’s at least statistically correlated that young men without a college degree do not do so well economically as those who do have a college degree.

Here’s another thing, and this tells us something about, not only demographics and economics, it tells us something about worldview and morality. It turns out, now get this. It turns out that even as you have an increased percentage of young women going to college, successfully graduating from college, advancing economically, many young men are falling behind.

It turns out that many young women, they have no intention of marrying or linking themselves to a young man of lesser educational or economic attainment. So that’s a big development. Now, a lot of this has come as a result of seismic changes at the end of the 20th century. So many women entering the workforce. Frankly, the entire economy being recalibrated. And as I say, this came with tremendous moral effects, recalibrated to have most homes as two-spouse homes to be two-income homes. That was a huge change in the culture. But it turns out that in such a context, it is women who often thrive. It is men, younger men in particular who often do not thrive.

So one of the things we come to understand by the way, is that in the main, this isn’t a rule, but in the main, the educational academic context is more female-friendly than male-friendly, and this is particularly true, at least it appears, in the middle school and high school context. And that’s what sets one up for success or a lack of success in post-high school education, particularly in college or university educational attainment. Or to put it another way, you look at eighth graders and you look at 11th graders, you have more girls doing better, educationally, academically at those ages by and large, and thus that just ricochets through the educational process thereafter.

It’s showing up big time on American college and university campuses. But with all the talk about women’s liberation and women’s equality and all the rest, it turns out that one of the side effects of all of this is that women really don’t want to link themselves to lower-status men. That’s the bottom line.

It is clearly a reflection of status and the perception of status. Younger women are saying, “I am just not going to link myself to a man who makes less or has less educational attainment.” Now, the numbers in this sense at least should pan out generation by generation. In other words, it’s not like there’s been a time of war such as World War I in Britain and in Europe in which you had vast devastation and massive death in terms of a world conflagration in such a case that there just weren’t that many young men to marry all the available young women. At least when it comes to population demographics, that’s not the crisis.

The crisis is the mismatch between the expectations and perceived status of a lot of young women in our societies compared to young men. So if you take the total population of young men, the fact is that it is a smaller percentage of that population that many women will consider for marriage. Daniel Cox, Director of the Survey Center at the American Enterprise Institute, that’s a major Washington think tank. He’s the one who said, “The numbers aren’t netting out. They’re not netting out.” There’s an imbalance, and that imbalance comes with huge consequences. He ticked off, for instance, some data points, “More women than men are attending college, buying houses, and focusing on their friendships and careers over dating and marriage.”

The article goes on to say, “Stories of women complaining about the lack of quality men have long infused pop culture from Pride and Prejudice to Taylor Swift’s works. Yet women throughout history rarely questioned whether finding and securing a romantic partner should be a primary goal of adulthood.” The next sentence, “That seems to be changing.”

Well indeed, it not only seems to be changing, in one sense it appears to have changed. That’s another way of saying we’re already looking at a process that’s well underway. This isn’t something that’s just beginning and you look at a pattern and you say, “I wonder if this is going to be something that continues in a significant manner.” Oh, it has continued in a significant manner.

We’re now looking at something like hitting the panic button. Now, there’s also a mismatch between young men and young women in a different way, and I pointed this out just after the election and after the inauguration of President Trump. And that is that when you look at young women and young men right now, for the first time in American history, you have more young men attending church regularly than young women in that age cohort. That’s never happened before in the history of this kind of research.

The other thing is, is that there’s a mismatch, and it would shock people if told this just a few years ago, more young men right now say that they want to be married and want marriage to be a part of their lives than young women are now stating.

So for instance, just hear this from the report. “In a 2024 Wall Street Journal NORC,” that’s National Opinion Research Center poll, “58% of women aged 18 to 29 said marriage was at least somewhat essential to their vision of the American dream. That’s compared with 66% of young men.” Then in other words, far more young men than young women said they saw marriage as an essential part of their vision of the American dream, their own personal plan.

There’s another odd effect or perhaps even an odd cause that is mentioned here. Get this, “Marriage rates for men and women are in decline, in part owing to less pressure to pair off and higher expectations for a would-be match.” Melissa Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland said, “Dating apps make people feel like there might always be a better option. They view looking for a marriage partner the same way you would view looking for a job candidate.” Okay, sound the alarm again. We got a major problem here.

You know, this is a statement saying that dating apps, for example, I’ll just use the words, “Make people feel like there might always be a better option.” Now, you think about the history of marriage and you recognize, number one, the idea of voluntary pairing up is more recent and includes a thinner sliver of humanity than you might think.

Throughout most of human history, the fact is most marriages have almost assuredly been arranged. Again, we’re talking about cross-culturally, around the globe, over time, throughout the centuries, most marriages have not been a matter of just a young man and a young woman saying, “Hey, let’s get married. Will you marry me? I do.”

That’s been a part of the wedding ceremony, but it has come out of a context in which an entire community is sometimes involved, and certainly two different families were often involved. And again, all you have to do is think about Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet to understand how that worked. It was the expectation.

But this is where sociologists would point to, say the last 150, 200 years in Western societies and say, “What we have seen is the rise of what’s defined as companionate marriage.” Companionate marriage means that you have a young man and a young woman, or for that matter you have a man and a woman who are simply deciding, “We’re going to commit to each other in the covenant of marriage and we’re going to do so because we choose the companionship of the other,” not so much an arranged marriage anymore.

You have young people who are all of a sudden gathered in cities, they’re working in factories, they’re in proximity to one another, they’re on college and university campuses. That’s something new with the rise of coed education in the early 20th century, and that creates an opportunity where you go from arranged marriages or conscribed choice marriages. If you’re in a very small town, you never leave the very small town. You’ve got a smaller pool of prospective husbands or wives.

But when you go to a big city, you go to a massive college campus, you get into the industrial age, you all of a sudden have the rise of companionate marriage. Marriage gets redefined. But then you have the therapeutic revolution that comes along. None of this is in the Wall Street Journal piece, but it’s the essential background to understanding this. Then you have the therapeutic revolution, and Americans are told it’s all about you. It’s all about your self-fulfillment. It’s all about you meeting your life goals. And so the question transforms marriage because to what extent would this husband or this wife lead us towards greater success in meeting our life goals?

And now you’re reaching the fact where this article is actually telling us that an increased percentage of young women are establishing life goals without any reference to marriage. Their life goals are not about who to marry. Their life goals are more about, “I’m not even the marrying kind. I don’t think I’m ever going to get married. I don’t think there’s anyone out there I want to marry. I don’t want to go through the meat grinder of even finding out.”

The mismatch in higher education is really huge. It’s at least 10%. Now we are told, “In 2024, 47% of American women aged 25 to 34 had a bachelor’s degree,” and that according to Pew, “Compared with 37% of men.” So, 47% of young women have a college degree and 37% of young men. “A bachelor’s degree increases net lifetime earnings by $1 million according to a 2024 report from Georgetown University.”

That sounds about right, frankly, just in terms of across-the-board comparisons, a college degree, it does make a huge difference. I’m not saying that without a college degree you can’t get a good job and have a good life and have a stable financial marriage and family. I’m just saying that statistically over time, someone with a college degree is likely to make about a million dollars over the lifetime more than someone who does not.

Now by the way, what this article doesn’t really tell you is that marriage becomes the great income accelerator, and it’s not just a combination, potentially of two salaries. It is also the fact that marriage becomes a great accelerant in terms of gaining wealth. More likely to own a home, more likely to gain by the appreciation in real estate, more likely to be making long-term investments. And of course, the horizon changes once the marriage is joined with children.

By the way, when you look at women without a college degree, this article somewhat surprisingly says that they are among the least likely ever to get married. Their marriage rates by age 45 have, “Plummeted from 79% to 52%.” That’s massive. In just a short amount of time, falling from a likelihood of 79% to a likelihood of 52%, but there’s more to it as you might expect.

Part II

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The Growing Political Divide Between Young Men and Women: Women are Growing More Liberal Than Young Men – And It’s Having Massive Effects on Marriage Rates and More

For instance, when we go back to that paragraph, the other big distinction between young men and young women that’s mentioned is political affiliation, political ideology. Young men are overwhelmingly more likely to be conservative than young women. And it’s almost better to put it this way that young women are far more likely to be liberal than young men. There is a mismatch, and all you have to do is look at party affiliation to see exactly how that’s happening. Look at the voting records in the 2024 election, vast difference.

And a lot of young women are saying, “You know, I want to marry someone as liberal as I am. If I’m going to get married, it’s not going to be to some kind of conservative,” but an increased percentage of young men are conservative. And the more they think about it, the more conservative they become.

By the way, it is not coincidental that the more liberal women become, the more self-consciously conservative young men become, and it is because the liberalization of young women and the changes in the demography, they alert a lot of young men to the fact that something basic has changed. And again, that is reflected in the 2024 election cycle, but it was visible for those who have eyes to see long before November of 2024.

What do women who aren’t married think they’re missing? Well, one of the young women quoted in the article says she’s missing someone to help pay the rent. For this young woman, “Not having anyone else to financially depend on, or split rent with is the worst part of being single.” This young woman who’s 38 years old went on to say, “Especially with the threat of layoffs, it’s much more stressful being a single person.”

Now here’s where things just get turned upside down. So does marriage bring increased financial stability? The answer is yes. Does marriage bring the likelihood of greater wealth accumulation over the adult lifespan? The answer is yes. But is marriage primarily about having someone with whom you can share the rent? The answer is no. And if that’s the primary thing you’re losing by not getting married, it’s unlikely there’s going to be any recovery of a marriage culture out of that.

The political divide between young men and young women is directly addressed in the article. “The growing political divide between men and women has compounded the challenges of finding love. Around 39% of women ages 18 to 29 identified as liberal in 2024 according to Gallup compared with 25% of their male peers. This gap has more than tripled in a decade.” So just in the last 10 years, this gap has tripled.

In demographic terms, that’s seismic. That should get all of our attention. If you have this kind of tripling of a percentage on the conservative-liberal spectrum, you’re really talking about something with a male-female distinction, with 32% of women and 28% of men calling themselves liberal in 2014. Again, the numbers right now, 39% of women, 29% of young men.

Now all of these surveys are interesting and you can ask questions about any of them, but when it comes to liberal-conservative, when it comes to young women, you’re talking about 39%. That’s massive. That is an incredibly large percentage because when you look at the spectrum, liberal is a very well-identified position. And when you look at young men, you’re looking at say, 75% of young men identifying as either conservative or something very much different than liberal. So you’re now looking at a divergence that is growing deeper, wider, and more significant, unquestionably so.

Part III

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Marriage, Creation Order, and the Goods of Marriage: An Urgent Christian Appeal for Honoring Marriage, Especially in a Secular Age

But now let’s just step back from the research and let’s think in terms of the biblical worldview, think in terms of Christian truth, Christian reasoning. As I said in the beginning, the closer you get to creation order, a crisis in creation order, the closest you get to a five-alarm fire. And in this case you’re talking about the very heart of creation order.

Just to remind ourselves, creation order goes back to creation. It goes back to God’s act for his glory in creating the cosmos, and he created human beings in his image. In his image, created he them male and female, created he them. And to the man and the woman, he said, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.”

And that tells us that the creation marriage mandate is not some kind of sociological fact. It’s a theological fact. It is to use theological language. It’s an ontological fact. This is God’s creation intention. He made man and woman to be together. “It was not good,” it was declared, God declared, “For man to be alone, nor for woman.” And in looking at this, you recognize this is not a small change. This is not just a major statistical change. This is a subversion of creation order and this will lead to human tragedy. I read this article and I’m just heartbroken. I’m heartbroken for the young women in this article who seem to have abandoned marriage on their horizon. And we’re not talking about a number of people to whom a gift of celibacy has been given, in the distribution, a gift to a church for service for the gospel.

No, we’re talking about a sociological reality, a demographic reality of increasing numbers of young women just deciding across the society that marriage is not for them, deciding they’re going to go through life without a husband.

An increased number of young men don’t want that. They want a wife, they want marriage. They want a wife and marriage and children, but some of the women in this article say that’s not the picture they want. They don’t want, as one woman said here, the husband, and the wife, and the kids with a white picket fence. They want something else.

So here you have the therapeutic age, you have the self-assertion age, you have the personal autonomy age. It all comes together, and of course, with the mismatch in educational and economic attainment, and a situation in which many women have just decided they’re not all that interested in marriage.

Now those listening to The Briefing are likely to be a very different population. And so there are an awful lot of young women who are hearing me talk about this today and they’re saying, “That’s not me. I want to be married.” And I think that’s quite natural because I think the closer you get to the Scripture, the closer you get to the gospel, the closer you get to celebrating creation order, and the deeper are the yearnings to live a life consistent with that creation order rather than in contradiction to it.

And so a part of the responsibility of Christian parents, even a responsibility of the Christian Church and a responsibility of Christian leaders is to help more young men be ready for marriage, be ready to be husbands, be ready to be fathers unapologetically, to be able to grow up on time, and put away the video games, and put away the toys, and put away the laziness, and get busy and show up as a young man some young woman is going to want to marry, and some young man who’s going to be able to fulfill the responsibilities of being a husband.

And we also have to address the identity crisis, which is a moral crisis or a spiritual crisis among many young women who are looking for the wrong attainments in life, are looking for the wrong life goals, and quite honestly need to be confronted with that. That is not why they were made for the glory of God. That is not God’s intention. God’s intention, we know is found in creation order and in our identity in Christ. There are certainly other headlines we could talk about, but I’ve given this attention to this issue today because of the catalyst of having in the larger society, this kind of question asked, this kind of headline emerge. If even the secular culture, if even The Wall Street Journal says, “We may be in a major crisis here,” we as Christians understand, you don’t even have a hint how deep and how big and how wide the problem is.

Now, I want to speak honestly and say I have no idea how to address this across the entire culture, I don’t. If I were responsible for the entire culture and trying to reverse these trends, I don’t know how I would. But I am speaking particularly to Christians, and that’s why I speak particularly to the Christian church, to Christian parents, and to Christian families, and Christian young people.

And I just want to say this is a bracing reminder of the thinking of the world and the temptations of the age. And it is our responsibility, not just our opportunity, it is our responsibility to press against this age and quite honestly, to show the watching world around us what it means to honor marriage, what it means to align with creation order, what it means to live out the glory of God in the structures of creation, and in the glory of marriage, and in the wonder of a family, and in the gift of children, and in the discipline of a mother and a father, a husband and a wife loving each other and raising their children in the nurtured admonition of the Lord.

Now to be honest, if you had told me when I was a little boy, if you’d told me a long time ago, in the midst of a very different America, if you had told me that understanding, affirming and living out that vision of marriage, that life vision, that it would be profoundly countercultural and would require a great deal of courage and resistance, I don’t think I could have understood it.

But folks, I appeal to you now, we better understand it in the present because the emergency isn’t hypothetical. It’s here. The main problem here, in other words, isn’t romantic, it’s spiritual.