{"id":15122,"date":"2013-04-04T11:01:35","date_gmt":"2013-04-04T16:01:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/yimcatholic\/?p=15122"},"modified":"2017-01-24T17:20:23","modified_gmt":"2017-01-24T22:20:23","slug":"ross-douthat-writing-on-class-culture-and-the-decline-of-marriage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/yimcatholic\/2013\/04\/ross-douthat-writing-on-class-culture-and-the-decline-of-marriage.html","title":{"rendered":"Ross Douthat, Writing on “Class, Culture, and the Decline of Marriage”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Justice Anthony Kennedy, during discussion of arguments for overturning California\u2019s Proposition 8, stated that same-sex marriage was like heading into \u201cuncharted waters<\/a>.\u201d Not so, at least not from the perspective of the Catholic Church. She would argue that these are well known shoals, clearly labeled on the navigators\u2019 charts.<\/p>\n

But the culture in America is not steeped in the Church\u2019s teaching,though a number of the Supreme Court justices, who are Catholic, should be. But for the majority of Americans, perhaps the real story about calls for same-sex marriage is \u201chow did we get here?\u201d This is where Ross Douthat plays a helpful role in breaking down what has happened to the institution of marriage.<\/p>\n

You will want to read the entire piece, which Douthat warns is long. Here\u2019s a snippet that caught my eye.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>But there\u2019s another story you can tell here, about how different models of marriage work out (or don\u2019t) for different communities and socioeconomic groups.\u00a0Liberal doubts about\u00a0the past existence of a procreative grounding for marriage<\/a>\u00a0notwithstanding, there\u2019s a general understanding that the combination of the sexual revolution, economic change, and shifting gender norms have altered the way Americans conceptualize marriage, what they expect out of the institution, and how it shapes their romantic and reproductive choices. There are different takes on how this change has worked and what it means, celebratory and critical and everywhere in between \u2014\u00a0from Stephanie Coontz\u2019s line about\u00a0\u201chow love conquered marriage\u201d<\/a>\u00a0to Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson\u2019s description of a new\u00a0\u201cconsumption partnership\u201d<\/a>\u00a0model of wedlock to the\u00a0George-Gergis-Anderson<\/a>\u00a0view of a \u201crevisionist\u201d view of marriage displacing a \u201cconjugal\u201d understanding. But I think a lot of people would recognize the phenomenonas the National Marriage Project describes it<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Over the last four decades, many Americans have moved away from identifying with an \u201cinstitutional\u201d model of marriage, which seeks to integrate sex, parenthood, economic cooperation, and emotional intimacy in a permanent union. This model has been overwritten by the \u201csoul mate\u201d model, which sees marriage as primarily a couple-centered vehicle for personal growth, emotional intimacy, and shared consumption that depends for its survival on the happiness of both spouses. Thus where marriage used to serve as the gateway to responsible adulthood, it has come to be increasingly seen as a capstone of sorts that signals couples have arrived, both financially and emotionally\u2014or are on the cusp of arriving.<\/em><\/p>\n

As the passage suggests, this model didn\u2019t just spring into being fully formed in 1968 or so: It developed gradually, through experiments and experience and also through cultural conflict with alternative models \u2014 both a more institutional and procreation-oriented model, which remained (and still remains) influential, especially among more religious Americans, and the more purely libertine, entirely deinstitutionalized approach to sex and relationships that gave us so many wonderful trends in the 1970s. To the extent that the \u201csoul mate\u201d\/capstone model has steadily gained ground relative to the alternatives, it\u2019s because it seems to offer a plausible, stabilizing balance between sexual freedom and sexual restraint, new gender roles and traditional forms, adult liberty and children\u2019s needs, the secular and the spiritual. And it offers, as well, a model of marriage that can easily encompass gay and lesbian partnerships as well as male-female ones, which is why the idea of same-sex wedlock has passed so quickly from seeming absurd to seeming commonsensical.<\/p>\n

But whereas the institutional model was associated with similar family structures for rich and poor alike, the soulmate\/capstone model has thus far only really been stabilizing for the upper and upper middle classes. For the most vulnerable Americans, poor African-Americans and then whites, the new model never had a chance to work: The \u201970s-era combination of sudden sexual freedom and economic stagnation \u2014 and if you accept the Charles Murray thesis, perverse welfare policies \u2014 more or less demolished traditional family structures in a generation, helping to create the underclass as we know it today. For Middle America, meanwhile, there has been a slower but unmistakable drift away from two-parent households and stable families, which has accelerated as the forces propping the older, institutional understanding \u2014 traditional Christianity, in particular \u2014 have seen their influence over American life diminish. Only among the college-educated has the new model brought anything like the kind of stability that Americans took for granted half a century ago \u2014 mostly, one might submit, because the rewards for following a careful \u201ceducation, job, marriage, kids\u201d trajectory are so obvious that college-educated American understand the marriage-procreation connection intuitively, as a kind of gnostic wisdom that doesn\u2019t need to be spelled out.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Justice Anthony Kennedy, during discussion of arguments for overturning California\u2019s Proposition 8, stated that same-sex marriage was like heading into \u201cuncharted waters.\u201d Not so, at least not from the perspective of the Catholic Church. She would argue that these are well known shoals, clearly labeled on the navigators\u2019 charts. But the culture in America is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":140,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,232,36],"tags":[349,151,53,149,1044],"class_list":["post-15122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-learning","category-living","tag-marriage","tag-ny-times","tag-other-blogs","tag-ross-douthat","tag-same-sex-unions"],"yoast_head":"\nRoss Douthat, Writing on "Class, Culture, and the Decline of Marriage"<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Justice Anthony Kennedy, during discussion of arguments for overturning California's Proposition 8, stated that same-sex marriage was like heading into\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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