In 2014, Anthony Esolen published Defending Marriage, responding to the effort to redefine marriage to include same-sex couples. In it, he argues that the fight over redefining marriage was lost long before this specific policy battle, when we began to lose sight of marriage as a permanent, exclusive, fruitful bond between husband and wife. Conn Carroll’s recent book Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage Is Destroying Democracy, published 10 years after Esolen’s, serves as a helpful reminder of why social conservatives lost those fights and why we should continue to care about how American society understands marriage.
Carroll’s book is useful as a standalone resource, especially for those in the policy or legal world who wish to understand why bolstering marriage would benefit us all. His thorough historical accounts and presentations of social science research make that argument quite compellingly. He also offers plenty of suggestions for policy specifics, including a host of ways to encourage marriage and childbearing. One particularly useful element of the book is its explanation of policies that explicitly disincentivize or penalize marriage.
Another highlight is the chapter “The Assault on Marriage,” in which Carroll explores the origins of what we typically call the Sexual Revolution, though he presents it as one of several “sexual revolutions” throughout human history. This chapter offers a succinct reminder of how, for the thinkers and activists who brought about the Sexual Revolution, the abolition of marriage and family was an explicit goal, not an unintended consequence. Also striking is his chapter “Married to the State,” chronicling the many ways in which government programs have attempted to fill the void left by the disintegration of marriage and family.
Carroll also addresses some themes that most social scientists dodge. He references The Two-Parent Privilege, a recent book from University of Maryland economics professor Melissa S. Kearney, in which Kearney states: “I am focused on marriage as an institution that is defined by two people combining and sharing resources in a long-term contract. If you are looking for a book about marriage and love, this is not that book.”
He deems Kearney’s choice understandable given her liberal audience. “Many of [her readers] are not ready to hear explanations for why some cultural norms are better than others, about why human desires for physical and emotional intimacy are best channeled through monogamous marriage,” he writes. “But this book is ready to have that discussion.” And he does manage to offer a fairly compelling pro-marriage argument on those terms.
Even so, the answers to some of the questions he raises throughout the book remain outside the scope of his project. For instance, the data he cites do point in a pro-marriage direction, establishing important points such as that divorce is typically harmful to children and that fatherlessness contributes to social decline. But there are limits both to what data can demonstrate and how persuasive arguments based on social science and evolutionary biology can be.
Anyone familiar with books such as Sex and the Citizen knows that for every study pointing in one direction, there are bound to be studies substantiating precisely the opposite claim. Of course, this is not to say that we can’t survey the available statistics and find them pointing in the general direction of a conclusion; often they do, and often quite convincingly. But readers set on predetermined conclusions can always find numbers to back up their preferred viewpoint, or at least reason enough to ignore numbers to the contrary.
A more comprehensive argument for marriage would present relevant social science data and human history while also delving into the first principles that undergird this debate. What exactly is marriage, and what is it for? Is it merely a socially constructed guardrail meant to mitigate the risks of unfettered sexual activity? Should we see it as something more like the soulmate model, designed to provide for the emotional, psychological, and physical satisfaction of any two (or more) partners for only as long as the parties remain fulfilled? Or is it something greater?
It’s understandable that we’ve lost sight of the need to define marriage on a more fundamental level than its social or historical use. In large part, this is the result of no longer believing that there is such a thing as human nature or that we are creatures at all. Instead, we view ourselves as self-created, with a nature that is infinitely malleable. With this understanding, marriage is something we create for ourselves rather than an institution with a certain intrinsic form connected to the type of beings we are.
If we understand human nature as given, and especially if we recognize that we were created in the image of God, we can see how marriage is something more fundamental and not entirely man-made. Understanding marriage as a comprehensive union of one man and one woman ordered to family life— a bond meant to be permanent (i.e., lifelong), exclusive, and fruitful—presupposes a particular understanding of what human beings are by our very nature.
As Esolen argues in Defending Marriage, social conservatives lost the fight over redefining marriage a decade ago because we lost the fight over what marriage is decades before that. A shift toward acceptance of no-fault divorce and widespread use of contraception enshrined a view of marriage as a contract, terminable if either party ceases to find it satisfying and oriented toward the individual satisfaction of the spouses.
It should come as little surprise, then, that marriage as redefined over the decades no longer seems especially appealing or even noteworthy, and that marriage rates are correspondingly on the decline. As Carroll points out, “The proportion of women who have ever cohabitated has nearly doubled over the past twenty-five years, rising to the point that the number of adults who have ever cohabitated is now higher than the number who have ever been married.” There is little impetus to get married if marriage is just a semipermanent contract, nothing more than cohabitation with a big party and some legal window dressing.
Marriage is no longer seen as a lifelong adventure, difficult but worth the struggle; it’s something more like a temporary venue for extracting satisfaction from another person for as long as it can be managed. As the “partners” exchange wedding vows, they eyeball the exit sign on the back wall—and note how the impersonal workplace term, “spouse,” has replaced the deeply evocative “husband” and “wife.”
Watching as those around us search for meaning, it is clear that most Americans no longer believe in the possibility of lifelong love, defined by mutual self-sacrifice through the many peaks and valleys of life. Marriage involves suffering because of human frailty, to be sure, but it calls us to something more meaningful than viewing other people as a means of self-gratification. Treating marriage as the context for persistent self-gift is difficult but ultimately far more fulfilling, as it calls us to the task of growing in virtue through self-denial and real love, defined not as fleeting emotional pleasure but as a choice to act for the good of the other.
Those of us who understand this should consider how we might become more comfortable making a case for marriage in these terms. Carroll’s book serves an important purpose by helping readers consider the value of marriage, in both social and individual terms. His suggestions for policy improvements may help nudge more Americans in the direction of marriage. But ultimately, we need a cultural revival based on a recovery of what marriage and sex are for based on a true understanding of who human beings are.
