Part V examines the consequences of the decline of traditional marriage in American society as a result of the ascending humanist worldview.
Much of the material for this series has been excerpted from Ye shall be as gods which succinctly frames the opposing Christian and humanist worldviews with regard to human relationships in general and marriage specifically. [Johnson, Chapter 20, American Family – Marriage and Family.]
The family and societal carnage that occurred in America during the twentieth century and thereafter as a result of the domination of the humanist worldview is monumental and recounted in numerous studies and reports. The statistics reflecting the precipitous decline of marriage and the American family are incontrovertible and coincide almost exactly with the emergence of the Boomer generation in the mid-1960s and the rapid and accelerating ascendancy of the humanist worldview. Perhaps the signal statistic highlighting the collapse of marriage and the traditional family is the high level of births to unmarried mothers as reported in 2006: 68 percent of all black children, 45 percent of all Hispanic children, and 25 percent of all white children. [Rector, “The Collapse of Marriage and the Rise of Welfare Dependence.”]
The collapse of the traditional family is even more evident when one examines the population of women with and without spouse present. Of particular note is the dramatic twelve-fold percentage increase between 1960 and 1990 of women with children under the age of eighteen who have never married. This accounts for almost a third of all women with children under age 18 with no spouse present. For eighty years between 1880 and 1960, this figure declined from slightly over 12 percent to 2.6 percent in 1960 before the dramatic escalation to 31.6% in 1990. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, four out of every ten births in America were to unwed mothers. [Rector, “Marriage: America’s Greatest Weapon Against Child Poverty.”]
What is also remarkable and further highlights the impact of the humanistic view of marriage is the decline in the percentage of women with children under eighteen who have a spouse present. For eighty years between 1880 and 1960, this figure was very stable at or near 90 percent before dropping to 76 percent in 1990.
In their flight from marriage, humanists promised women emancipation and fulfillment; however, the big lie produced only bondage, drudgery, and exhaustion—poverty, long hours of daily separation from their children, and the drudgery of low-paying jobs in the workforce. The seeds planted by the those promoting the humanist worldview over the decades prior to the 1960s and thereafter have born bitter fruit—illegitimacy, cohabitation, fatherlessness, divorce, and a large number of single parent families with children who are locked in a continuing cycle of neglect and poverty. When compared to homes where children were raised by married parents, children raised in homes by single parents are more likely to encounter emotional and behavioral problems, drink, smoke, use drugs, be physically abused, exhibit poor school performance and drop out, and exhibit aggressive, violent, and criminal behavior. [Rector, “The Collapse of Marriage and the Rise of Welfare Dependence.”] And in such an environment the memory of what once was or might have been is lost, and the transmission of the central vision of American culture to another generation is in peril.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan retired from the United States Senate (Democratic Senator from New York) in 2000. Near the beginning of his career he was an assistant Secretary of Labor in Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. At the time of his retirement, the senator was asked to describe the biggest change he had seen in his forty years of government service. Articulate and intellectual, the distinguished public servant, having served both Democratic and Republican presidents, replied, “The biggest change, in my judgment, is that the family structure has come apart all over the North Atlantic world” and had occurred in “an historical instant. Something that was not imaginable forty years ago had happened.” Author of the 1965 Moynihan Report officially known as “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action”, Moynihan knew that of which he spoke. [Bennett, pp. 2, 85.] Enormously controversial at the time of its release, the report continues to be a topic of debate in the twenty-first century. The report characterized the instability of the black families in America and the importance of the family unit in providing that stability.
At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro Family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time…The role of the family in shaping character and ability is so pervasive as to be easily overlooked. The family is the basic social unit of American life; it is the basic socializing unit. By and large, adult conduct in society is learned as a child…the child learns a way of looking at life in his early years through which all later experience is viewed and which profoundly shapes his adult conduct. [Rainwater and Yancy, p. 3.]
Writing shortly after Moynihan’s perceptive summation of the condition of the family structure, William Bennett noted the deep concern of Americans with regard to the family. Bennett pointed to the general instability of the American family and the contributing factors such as the decline in the status and centrality of marriage in society, substantially greater percentage of out-of-wedlock births, and the significant increase in co-habitation. With the decline of social perception and necessity of matrimony, children are less valued, more neglected, more vulnerable to non-family influences, and have less resources devoted for their care and benefit. Bennett wrote that, “Public attitudes toward marriage, sexual ethics, and child-rearing have radically altered for the worse. In sum, the family has suffered a blow that has no historical precedent—and one that has enormous ramifications for American society.” [Bennett, pp. 1-2.]
Another decade has elapsed since Moynihan’s diagnosis of the disintegration of the family unit as the major modern affliction of the Western world and Bennett’s reporting of Americans’ purported concern for the survival of the family. It is no longer the problem of the black population. The deterioration of the family unit is pervasive and crosses all ethnic, socio-economic, and religious lines although the poor and disadvantaged bear a greater portion of the misery. Yet, there has been no public outcry to reverse the decline, no urgency or sense of crisis in dealing with the problem, no new series of government studies explaining the situation, and no investigative reporting or meaningful media attention regarding the most profound change in society that has had no historical precedent. Why is this so? The answer is that the solutions to reverse the decline and devastation of marriage and the family unit stand as polar opposites of the prevailing and pervasive humanistic worldview.
Larry G. Johnson
Sources:
Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods – Humanism and Christianity – The Battle for Supremacy in the American Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishers, 2011), pp. 316-3-17, 319-321.
Robert Rector, “The Collapse of Marriage and the Rise of Welfare Dependence,” Panel Discussion, Lecture #959, The Heritage Foundation (May 22, 2006). www.heritage.org/research/welfare/hl959.cfm (accessed September 17, 2010).
Robert Rector, “Marriage: America’s Greatest Weapon Against Child Poverty,” The Heritage Foundation, September 16, 2010, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2010/09/marriage-america-s-greatest-weapon-against-child-poverty (accessed September 21, 2010).
William J. Bennett, The Broken Hearth, (New York: Doubleday, 2001), pp. 1-2. 85.
Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy, (Cambridge Massachusetts: M.I.T. Press, 1967), p. 3.
