This month, Cato Unbound asks, Can marriage be saved? True, true, the idea of that word, marriage, is in peril.  Not that people will stop getting married, and not that my marriage, or your marriage, is suffering, but the idea of marriage, well.  When the culture can’t agree on what a word means, the thing it represents will suffer.  That’s just the truth.  If Christians are going to have any reasonable input into this cultural discussion, we need to read essays like these, that follow.

The Cato symposium starts with The Future of Marriage, the lead essay by Stephanie Coontz, who starts us off with a history of marriage, and she suggests that, “Instead of trying to resurrect a bygone ideal of marriage, those of us interested in encouraging healthy families now need to focus on what makes unmarried co-parents, single parents, cohabiting couples, as well as contemporary marriages successful on their own terms.”

In The Marriage Gap, Kay S. Hymnowitz writes about the class differences in the marriage issue and how, “overall, children do better in life if they are raised by their own married parents.”  She also says that, “The de-linking of marriage and childrearing is a particular dilemma in the Unites States … [W]hat you have is a recipe for entrenched, trans-generational poverty, inequality, racial disparities …, reduced social and economic mobility, and – libertarians take note! – demands for government taxes to fund programs to correct the mess.”

In Marriage and the Market, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers are economists who argue that marriage used to be about production and is now about consumption.  We tend to focus on spiritual and romantic ideas when we consider marriage, so it’s good to think about the practical realities of what used to necessitate marriage, versus what necessitates it now.  It is unwise to impose older economic practicalities of marriage on marriage today.  But this doesn’t mean marriages can’t still be good and theologically sound.

In Against Family Fatalism, Norval D. Glenn says there’s nothing wrong with wanting to reclaim some traditional idea of marriage, so long as we discard the bad and keep the good.