The Problem:
From Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, from Jimmy Carter to Joe Biden, across Democratic and Republican administrations, the American family has lost ground. Too many on the right have had a blind faith in the market’s power to bring prosperity and so much more to all families if the state can simply get out of the way. Too many on the left have had a blind faith in the state’s ability to seize the core functions of families—like providership and childcare—without injury to the strength, stability, and solidarity of American family life. And yet even as the Dow stands close to its record heights, and government spending on social welfare annually tops the trillion-dollar mark, family formation in America has hit historic lows. Get Married (2024), page 216.
The Solution:
. . . individual happiness is most likely found not by directly pursuing it for oneself but by opening your heart to love, marriage, and living for your spouse and family . . . we must defy the progressive orthodoxies about marriage, family life, individualism, and gender . . . We must push back against a culture that tells our young men and women that money and work are more important than marriage and family, discouraging and diverting them from focusing on love and marriage in their twenties and thirties, when they have the best shot at finding a spouse and maximizing their chances of marital success . . . We must encourage young men and women . . . to reject the me-first ethos of our culture and open their hearts to the we-first approach to love and marriage . . . Get Married, pages 227-228.
Introduction
I found it! Finally! The book on American family we’ve all been waiting for.
A complete update to Charles Murray’s monumental Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (2012). For the last ten years I’d given up reading most social research coming out of top universities. Much of university research and published work has been shallow, slanted, or downright false. Especially from our most highly-rated schools.
Instead, I’ve relied on books and commentary created inside think tanks in Washington, New York, and other large cities where scholars aren’t afraid to think outside-the-box, where they have less pressure to conform, and where they label their own political persuasion or worldview. Creativity, transparency, and honesty matter.
Our Praxis Circle posts have covered many outstanding books on family, such as those written by Mary Eberstadt, Ashley McGuire, Erika Bachiochi, and Richard Reeves (see Richard under “Sex” subheading). We’ve interviewed several Contributors, like Deirdre McCloskey, who hold the family as the center of any great civilization. Furthermore, there’s really little debate about that last point: no great civilizations have been built without strong nuclear families.
Well, a professor at the University of Virginia, Brad Wilcox, has finally done it!
Brad is a professor of sociology and the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, the Future of Freedom Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and—I guess we haven’t totally gotten away from think tanks—a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Brad is 55, married to Danielle, the father of seven children (five adopted and two twins), and Catholic. He’s a Connecticut native who lost his own father at age six. He graduated a Jefferson Scholar from UVA in 1992 and received his PhD from Princeton University.
Taking a different approach across American racial and identity lines (Mr. Murray analyzed “White America” to make key points applying then to all Americans, including African-Americans), in Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy The Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization (229 pages, 2024), Brad Wilcox offers rigorous social analysis updating the research on family since Murray’s book. It’s a complete, tight, and thoughtful package.
Most important, it draws conclusions providing clear social and political pathways sure to increase personal happiness and strengthen the nation. Through Wilcox’s book, the jury has rendered its verdict based on 55 years of human trial and error in America since the 1960s. (May I say, the experience has not been pretty.) Of course, little of what we know now that’s best for us is new news since ancient times. The difference? “Moderns” require statistical proof, when common sense and lifetimes of human experience used to be enough. Get Married provides that.
Overview
Brad’s preface and introduction establish marriage as the most important institution and foundation not just for Western civilization, but for every civilization. They also explain how America has gone off the rails since the “Me Decade” of the 1960s. Wilcox never hides the ball stating early in the book that research shows “giving ourselves to others—especially spouses and families—is the path most likely to lead to a meaningful and generally happy life for most of us.” (page xii). Near the end of the book he outlines the “success sequence” to be education, work, marriage, and childrearing, or to keep it really simple: high-school diploma, working full-time, and waiting until marriage to have children (page 215).
The first two chapters describe the sorry decline in marriage since the 1960s and the terrible effects it’s had on our population and nation. To me, one statistic says it all. The percentage of babies born in America to unwed parents went from 5% in 1960, to 11% in 1970, to 40% in 2023, being approximately stable at 40% since 2008. For African Americans, the statistics are particularly alarming: 22% of African American babies born to unwed parents in 1960, to 38% in 1970, to almost 70% in 2018 (one can imagine that percentage has only increased today).
The collapse of American marriage makes me a solid child rights advocate (Them Before Us). Children have a right to two parents, their actual parents. I need no research to land here.
In any case, my own coming of age decade of the 1970s—the age of partying (no apologies there) and disco—started us down the road to divorce court and welfare dependence. Marriage has fallen 65% in 55 years. The marriage rate has fallen 26% among those over 35 who were normally married. People today are getting married at about a rate equal to 35% of the number in 1970, when I was 15. Not only is America moving away from formal Christianity, it’s moved significantly away from family and marriage.
The good news is that declines have possibly bottomed, and harmful trends might be reversing. Those who do get married today tend to divorce less.
This is no time for celebration, however. The decline in marriage correlates to a significant increase in single living, placing tremendous pressures on the family unit. In general, about 2.5x more statistical bad things (like drug addiction and prison) happen in single families over married families. The bad effects on young men are ~2.5x worse than on women (often involving fatherless families). In single families, males are prone to misbehave or worse, and females are prone to depression or worse. Wilcox’s research confirms the “Coming Apart” (Belmont versus Fishtown) class influences remain and divide the majority of Americans from misguided wealthy elites.
Get Married analyzes many problems confronting America as the family has crumbled. Wilcox builds his case into the Problem Statement quoted at top by the end of the book. He apportions blame across the two dominant political parties as described in the excerpt. I would only add that, if I had to weight blame between the “Left and Right,” I might score in the range of 70/30. Brad’s Chapter Two describes the classes of Americans who are the Masters of Marriage (the best at getting and staying married and maximizing purpose and happiness in life). They are Asian Americans (China, Japan, etc; Indians being #1), Conservatives, The Faithful (or religious), and the Strivers (the secular “elites”).
While Christianity and Judaism remain dominant religions in the United States and generally offer the moral foundation underpinning our social, cultural, political, and economic secular society, Christians and Jews cannot claim their religion forms the only basis of strong marriages. By no means. Asian and Hindu families are equally strong or stronger. Furthermore, secular or purely pragmatic husbands and wives occupying the Striver category are also more than capable of going the distance in marriage and being happy. Depending on what is measured, the statistical differences among these groups are often not that great.
“Conservatism”
To me, what’s funny is the word “conservative” has little meaning when thinking about the American family. What is conservative? It really describes those with common sense and the talent to apply wisdom to life. Granted, conservatives and libertarians are not the same (see what follows); still, they apply a more balanced approach to their moral politics. See Jon Haidt’s classic PC video on the subject below. (For further background on this clip, see here. Also, to check your own political moral foundations, follow this link.)
My friend Steve Kelly offers humor below referring to the recent Supreme Court case involving Montgomery County, Maryland, also bearing on issues like trans males competing in female sports. It’s not directly applicable to Brad’s book, but it makes the point about common sense. There are good reasons why many people with common sense define marriage involving children as: (1) between a male and female, (2) for life, and (3) exclusive. By the way, all of Brad’s research seems to support that this definition of marriage gets optimal results in human fulfillment and happiness.
Back to the Overview
After describing the groups of Americans with the most success in marriage, Dr. Wilcox offers three terrific chapters disproving the the most destructive myths in our American cultural heights: (1) the flying solo myth (we are happiest going at life alone), (2) the family diversity myth (diversity, love, and money make a family, not marriage), and (3) the soulmate myth (we are better with a soulmate for as long as it lasts, rather than a husband or wife forever). Next are three chapters describing losing approaches to marriage: (1) those who place me before we, (2) those who believe children make life and marriage miserable, and (3) those who adopt a “maybe I do” mentality . . . in other words, “I stay married and true only if it works out.”
As Get Married hits the home stretch, it describes positive beliefs and behaviors that help traditional marriages succeed, followed by how religion helps shape and sustain them. Clearly, for Christians and Jews, the marriage relationship is symbolic of and second only to each individual’s relationship to God, as Imago Dei. God, the Creator of the world and each human being, participates in the marriage relationship, joins husband and wife as one, and blesses parents with children as creators and sustainers themselves.
The books concludes with a balanced assessment of how both political classes, Right and Left, have failed the American family since the Sexual Revolution. In conclusion, Chapter 12 summarizes how marriage offers the surest way to find happiness successfully, offering The Solution quoted at top and the Five Pillars (or “Five C’s”) of first-and-only marriages.
Worldview
Without question, Get Married is a worldview book blending research, individual and couple anecdotes, theory, and practice. It applies various worldview narratives to explain the results of its research. We find every marriage is different just like every person is different. There are many successful marriages breaking all the rules. Furthermore, there are many people happy in multiple marriages or none in countless living situations. What Brad describes, however, is what seems to hold true in the middle of the bell curve for the American population that’s remained true for hundreds of years.
Notes of caution: the book’s findings of difference between key, successful marriage styles sometimes appear slight, and most bad trends tend to bottom out or migrate over time.
Again, the book does cast blame for the marriage carnage infecting America since the 1960s on our highly successful cultural elites who say marriage is confining and unnecessary to the public, but then orient their lives in highly “successful” ways via traditional life styles. Such rank hypocrisy destroys all it touches, and the American public has grown wise to elite behavior.
Perhaps the other primary culprit in Get Married is extreme forms of third and fourth stage feminism tending to belittle or demonize men (third stage) or deny the differences between male and female altogether (fourth stage).
Our current day decadence in the most wealthy nation in the world with the most technology anywhere also takes on Barbie‘s surreal quality. Fantasy attempted in real life is usually not pretty (unlike Barbie) and difficult (like Barbie). Feminists want to shape the world to their liking, but they fail to consider men have a mind of their own. Feminists can create their own male Frankensteins.
Finally, there are the macho men who often lack character, are selfish or abusive, or who have simply called time out and given up being serious about women, perceiving them as wastes of time beyond sex. Clearly, all of this confusion has had devastating effects on the lowest classes, with federal and state governments attempting to assume the role of parents and fathers.
The Solution
I paraphrase Dr. Wilcox’s solution at top. In addition to this general advice, he offers five political policy solutions that would strengthen marriage and fix the “marriage penalty” (welfare state rules creating greater incentives for parents to remain unmarried than to marry). This is a major strength of the book. While recognizing today’s generally accepted American ethic of equality in the work place among men and women and allowing for any preferred division of labor between spouses at home, Brad does not commit the frequent policy error (in my view) of trying to make men more like women and women more like men.
On average, men and women are significantly different, and today even feminists are waking up to this biological fact. If women want to be married, they should consider their ideology. The gap between liberal and conservative women who are married has widened from 10 points in 2000 to 17 points in 2021, a 70% increase. That’s fine for those 21-year-old liberal women who want a husband and children, but maybe not for those who are 40. Yet again, worldview matters.
Nations with healthy and stable families succeed; those without them fail.
Brad mentions one more thing we will need to revive America’s families and to defy the elite “wisdom” on marriage, family life, and gender: courage. I’ve texted a reference to the book to each of my three adult children and their spouses who are all parents. I suggested that anyone who is a parent or counselor (my daughter, a UVA grad, is both and a mother of three boys) should put this book under his or her pillow.
To courage, I would add humility: the humility to understand that maybe what is cool, easy, or most pleasurable in the short term is not the best for oneself or other loved ones in the long term. In other words, maybe, just maybe, those Victorians and ancients might have understood a few basics about fundamental human nature in male and female forms that we sophisticated moderns do not.
Now, how about a friendly date-night out? It’s on the Institute for Family Studies and me.
