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Part II: Weakening the Foundations of Society and Church:

Website of The National Marriage Project at Rutgers University.

In a 2007 Rutgers University Research Paper entitled: The State of Our Unions: The Social Health of Marriage in America, 2007, the researchers identified a number of specific areas of concern for the family unit. Among these was:

1. there exists "a broad cultural shift away from religion and social traditionalism and toward faith in personal independence and tolerance for diverse life styles — otherwise known as 'secular individualism'. This cultural shift is a central feature of modern societies and therefore unlikely to be reversed." Yet researchers also concluded that:
2. at some point in the future, there must occur, in order for society to continue to function, a shift, however small, to "the view that personal happiness depends on high-trust and lasting relationships and that such relationships require constraints on short-term adult interests in order to foster long-term commitments to children, and thus to the future."

In short, without a shift to a situation where 'stable' families are the pre-dominant environments for children to be nurtured in, we will as a society be breeding future generations of individuals without roots, without a sense of identity, without an awareness of the notion of selflessness, without an appreciation of the importance of unfailing commitment. So disparate are the cultures of the married non-divorced families from those who are divorced, or are children of co-habitating couples, that the author of the Rutger's study, David Popenoe, claims that within the United States there are in fact two nations currently being built: "Today, more children are born out-of-wedlock (now almost four out of ten), and more are living in stepfamilies, with cohabiting but unmarried adults, or with a single parent. This means that more children each year are not living in families that include their own married, biological parents, which by all available empirical evidence is the gold standard for insuring optimal outcomes in a child's development."

That there are a great number of broken families in our society, should not see us as a society setting new benchmarks for cultural norms — by so doing we will in fact be creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, continually drawing a line in the sand behind the last we have drawn, and daring the tide to cross it once more — which if it is given the freedom to do so, it inevitably will.

What we need as a society to do, is to acknowledge the modern tragedy of the breakdown of the family unit, understand the benefits of a unified family, and strive toward strengthening future generations, creating a climate of stability and emotional maturity — through specific targeting of the youth in Schools — in family re-education programmes. What we do not need is condemnation of people whose families have ruptured, nor alternately a politically correct wave of apologetics that suggest that such families are no different from those which are still unified.

Similarly there is of course an enormous need within society to help piece together the fractured lives of so many individuals. As John Paul II explained in Familiaris Consortio (1981):

"Each of these elements presents the Church with arduous pastoral problems, by reason of the serious consequences deriving from them, both religious and moral (the loss of the religious sense of marriage seen in the light of the Covenant of God with His people; deprivation of the grace of the sacrament; grave scandal), and also social consequences (the destruction of the concept of the family; the weakening of the sense of fidelity, also towards society; possible psychological damage to the children; the strengthening of selfishness). The pastors and the ecclesial community should take care to become acquainted with such situations and their actual causes, case by case. They should make tactful and respectful contact with the couples concerned, and enlighten them patiently, correct them charitably and show them the witness of Christian family life, in such a way as to smooth the path for them to regularize their situation. But above all there must be a campaign of prevention, by fostering the sense of fidelity in the whole moral and religious training of the young, instructing them concerning the conditions and structures that favor such fidelity, without which there is no true freedom; they must be helped to reach spiritual maturity and enabled to understand the rich human and supernatural reality of marriage as a sacrament." (par. 81)

A further study on the breakdown of the family unit, Elizabeth Marquardt's, Between Two Worlds (2006), also revealed a number of quite devastating conclusions:

1. children of divorce come to feel like divided selves, living a certain code of values with one parent, and then a different set of values with the other parent;
2. 'secrets' are endemic in divorced families — one parent not knowing what is being said when the child is with the other parent, and the child not knowing how their parent is living when they are away from them;
3. children of divorce prematurely age, in that they must deal with confronting emotional issues, which by the very nature of a divorce cannot be sheltered from them. In many cases the child becomes the confidante for a grieving spouse, sitting with a crying parent, listening to a highly charged emotional issues;
4. children of divorce must try and attempt to rationalize the opposing moral views of their parents within their minds, for the conversation no longer takes place in front of them, nor is there any resolution;
5. children who have experienced divorce in the family, are also typified by a loss of trust in authority and relationships, that combined, undermine a belief in God. Children from such families are far less likely to have religious adherence. There are however a small number of children whose faith in God is however strengthened after the divorce experience.

Vatican II on the vital nature of the family for the social and religious development of the child…

It is interesting at this point to compare the findings of Elizabeth Marquardt's research with an excerpt from Gaudium et Spes (1965) on the vital nature of the family for the social and religious development of the child:

"The family is a kind of school of deeper humanity. But if it is to achieve the full flowering of its life and mission, it needs the kindly communion of minds and the joint deliberation of spouses, as well as the painstaking cooperation of parents in the education of their children. The active presence of the father is highly beneficial to their formation. The children, especially the younger among them, need the care of their mother at home. This domestic role of hers must be safely preserved, though the legitimate social progress of women should not be underrated on that account … Thus the family, in which the various generations come together and help one another grow wiser and harmonize personal rights with the other requirements of social life, is the foundation of society. All those, therefore, who exercise influence over communities and social groups should work efficiently for the welfare of marriage and the family. Public authority should regard it as a sacred duty to recognize, protect and promote their authentic nature, to shield public morality and to favor the prosperity of home life. The right of parents to beget and educate their children in the bosom of the family must be safeguarded. Children too who unhappily lack the blessing of a family should be protected by prudent legislation and various undertakings and assisted by the help they need." (par. 52)

In terms of more contemporary research, another researcher, Billie Clare Myers in her study, Religiosity and Gender Attitudes, confirms the importance of religion within the life of the family: "Religion has positively influenced families in many ways. Religious families have handled conflicts within the family in healthier ways than nonreligious families. Moreover, Abbott and Berry (1990), noted religious families were more likely to seek guidance and assistance from God and exhibit family satisfaction than nonreligious families. Religious families also have had closer familial ties and higher quality mother-child (Pearce & Axinn, 1998) and father-child relationships (King, 2003; Roggman, Benson, & Boyce, 1999). In addition, religious fathers were more familiar with the development of their infants (Roggman et al., 1999). Besides finding more involvement in religious fathers than nonreligious fathers King (2003) found religious fathers considered marriage and having children to be more important than nonreligious fathers and were more egalitarian in their views about household chores and childcare than nonreligious fathers." (Myers, American Journal of Psychological Research, Vol. 3, No. 1, September, 2007)

Yet in addition to these findings, in a previous study, The Top Ten Myths of Divorce (April 2001), Rutger's University researchers also concluded that: "Marriages of the children of divorce actually have a much higher rate of divorce than the marriages of children from intact families. A major reason for this, according to a recent study, is that children learn about marital commitment or permanence by observing their parents. In the children of divorce, the sense of commitment to a lifelong marriage has been undermined".

This research was further substantiated in a paper, entitled, The Legacy of Marital Discord for The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology written by Paul R. Amato and Alan Booth, both at Pennsylvania State University. The authors concluded:

"The two most viable hypotheses are that marital quality is transmitted across generations either through direct observation of parental behavior or through disruptions in parent-child relationships." (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2001, Vol. 81, No. 4, p. 637)

The much acclaimed work of Professor Judith Wallerstein (2001), The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce, also concurs with these findings, in that even as long as twenty-five years after the divorce occurred, the children of divorce are still shattered by the separation of their parents — to the point that their emotional torment is self-destructing potentially good marital relationships.

Religion is not an immunization against divorce…

However, according to the Barna Research Group, the very fact that one belongs to a particular religious groups, in itself does not miraculously immunize the marriage from the risk of divorce. In their study of 2006, research findings revealed that the marriages of atheists and agnostics tended in comparison to Christian marriages, (without marriage preparation), to be longer lasting. Within Christian communities, the Brana study highlighted that those marital unions that had the shortest life-span were those from the Pentecostal and Baptist communities.

Marriages in which the partners belonged to the mainstream Christian communities: Lutherans, (specifically mentioned from Protestantism) and the Catholic Church, according to this study, had a considerably higher rate of success. As the founder of the Research Group, George Barna commented: "While it may be alarming to discover that born again Christians are more likely than others to experience a divorce, that pattern has been in place for quite some time. Even more disturbing, perhaps, is that when those individuals experience a divorce many of them feel their community of faith provides rejection rather than support and healing. But the research also raises questions regarding the effectiveness of how churches minister to families. The ultimate responsibility for a marriage belongs to the husband and wife, but the high incidence of divorce within the Christian community challenges the idea that churches provide truly practical and life-changing support for marriages." (The Barna Group, September 2004, Born Again Christians Just As Likely to Divorce As Are Non-Christians) In essence, the findings stressed the importance of marriage preparation — for religious belief can be as much a divisive force as it can be a unifying one within a marriage.

So what implications do these studies have for a Church and western society beginning a new millennium? How does the family dynamic alter the direction of a society, and the perceived relevance of the Church?

CONTINUED IN PART III
ARTICLE NAVIGATION: PART I | PART II | PART III | PART IV
Readers may also be interested in the series by Peregrinus
which examined the Scriptural understandings of Divorce and the
different perspectives taken by different Christian churches.

Bibliography:
See the Bibliography at the bottom of Part IV.

Photo Credits:
Clicking on the images will take you to the original source and or further information.

©2007 Dr Andrew Thomas Kania

[Index of Commentaries by Dr Andrew Kania]