The Marriage Privilege
Photo by Just married by Richard Hoare, CC BY-SA 2.0
“Freakonomics” was one of the first podcasts that I ever listened to, and it remains one of my favorites. The show and the associated books delve into “the hidden side of everything” and often turn up surprising data-based information that undercuts our assumptions about economics and life. And sometimes, the data confirms the obvious. That was the case with a recent episode about marriage.
“Mawiage,” as the “Princess Bride” tells us, “is what brings us together today. Mawiage, that blessed arrangement, that dream within a dream. And love, true love, will follow you forever, so treasure your love.”
Marriage often gets a bad rap. In the sitcom world, marriage is a joke, a trope used to lob insults and putdowns back and forth between man and wife. In the sitcom world, when fathers are present at all, they are often of the Al Bundy mold. Even going back to the 60s, television families were often single-parent households. Shows such as “The Andy Griffith Show,” “My Three Sons,” “Bonanza,” “One Day At a Time,” “Alice,” and even “The Beverly Hillbillies” depicted families raised by a single parent long before the “Murphy Brown” controversy of the 80s.
Sometimes life imitates television, at least to some extent. That is partially the case with single-parent families. Since the days of “The Andy Griffith Show,” the share of single-parent households has risen sharply in the United States to the point where they represent almost a quarter (23 percent) of the living arrangements of American children.
I was surprised to learn that this is not so everywhere. In fact, the US has the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households. The average rate elsewhere is seven percent, about a third that of the US.
This really isn’t something that we want to be Number One in. Despite the fact that most single parents truly love and want the best for their children, it is an empirical fact that children raised in single-parent households have higher chances of a number of bad outcomes that range from aggression to engaging in high-risk behaviors to living in poverty.
This makes sense because it is obvious that having an extra parent provides a family with numerous advantages. Often there are two incomes, but in families with one wage earner, the other parent usually takes care of the children. Not having to pay for childcare can be the near equivalent of another income. It also means that someone else is available to share the labor and mental stresses of raising children.
When all this is considered, it’s easy to understand Barack Obama’s 2008 comment about not wanting his daughters to be “punished with a baby.” Obama’s statement drew widespread criticism at the time, but I think that we all understand what he meant. Having a baby is a consequence of actions. It isn’t a punishment, but sometimes it can feel that way.
Having a baby is a life-altering experience and, if someone is unprepared, it can be a significant financial drain. Despite the costs, babies are still a blessing, but the situation can be stressful for a great many parents, just as it might be economically and emotionally stressful to care for an elderly parent.
That brings us to the “Freakonomics” conversation with Melissa Kearney, an economics professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, and author of “The Two-Parent Privilege.” Kearney’s research found that, even though her liberal circles seemed uncomfortable facing it, inequality and social mobility were closely related to family structure.
“I could totally see my dad being like, “How much did you have to study to write a book that two-parent households are helpful? Like, duh,” she jokes.
Kearney first defines the nature of the problem, which isn’t what you might think. “A really important fact is that the trends I’m talking about have not been driven by divorce,” she notes. “They’ve been almost entirely driven by an increase in never-married. Meaning, they’ve been driven by an increase in non-marital births. So, unpartnered mothers now are much more likely than in the past to never have been married than to be divorced.”
“Teen childbearing in particular has fallen tremendously — over 70 percent since the mid-nineties,” she continues. “Based on that alone, we would have expected a decline in single-parent households, and yet we’ve seen this large increase in single-parent households.”
Left unaddressed in the podcast is the topic of abortion. Freakonomics became infamous in the past for its discussion of abortion about 20 years ago when the authors posited that there was a link between higher abortion rates and lower crime rates. Given what we know about the negative outcomes of children in single-parent families, I don’t doubt their statistics, but I do disagree with the notion that abortion is a good solution to the crime problem, which incidentally is an argument that the “Freakonomics” did not make.
Sometimes economic outcomes run afoul of morality and ethics. I don’t believe that killing unborn children is a moral solution to the problem of crime any more than I believe that euthanizing the elderly and infirm is a moral solution to the problem of allocating scarce medical and financial resources.
Kearney does not advocate for abortion in the podcast either. She does suggest a two-pronged approach in which we try to incentivize marriage while also providing financial support to low-income single-parent households.
One way of incentivizing marriage is to remove what she calls the “secondary-earner penalty” but is more commonly known as the “marriage penalty.” Our tax structure is a holdover from the days when most households had one wage earner, but those days are long past. Similarly, many aid programs are means-tested and parents can lose government benefits if they get married and have to count a second income. Reform is needed to provide incentives (and remove disincentives) for couples to get married and stay married.
I’ll add here as well that as a society, we need to change the expectations about weddings. It’s common for couples to wait years to get married so that they can spend tens of thousands of dollars on the equivalent of a royal wedding. This may be the princess dream of many young girls, but it isn’t practical in a great many cases. Many couples would be far better off having a small wedding and using the money as a down payment on a house or to pay off student loans or save for their children’s education. Let’s break the stranglehold of the Wedding Industrial Complex that tells us that weddings have to be over the top, especially for low-income couples that already have children.
Along the same lines, I’m going to break with a lot of my Christian friends and say that marriage doesn’t have to involve a government certificate. If two people want to make a religious commitment to each other and leave the government out of it in order to avoid the penalties of marriage, I’m fine with that. In Biblical terms, I believe that it is the public affirmation of commitment that is important rather than a government stamp of approval.
The second prong of Kearney’s strategy is to provide aid to low-income families. Kearney points out that “scholars showed the amazing reduction in child poverty associated with the increase in the child tax credit, as well as all the other fiscal transfers, such that during a pandemic and a recession, we actually dramatically reduced child poverty in this country.”
The problem, she notes, was that “Congress, led by Republicans who didn’t want to make this permanent — the worry was, if we go back to just giving unconditional cash to families who don’t work, we’re essentially going back to the pre-[19]96 welfare world. And then the other complaint, which was a reasonable one, was, this is expensive because we’re sending checks to really high-income families; like 90 percent of families got it.”
These are reasonable objections. If you subsidize something, you typically get more of it. And subsidies are expensive. In fact, the largest share of federal spending already goes to entitlement programs.
One answer would be means-testing to target aid programs to needy families. Phasing benefits out slowly as families become self-sufficient would also help, as would occupational education programs to help give unskilled workers a hand up.
And that brings us back to abortion. I’ve noted before that in states with restrictive abortion laws, an intended consequence is going to be more births. A lot of those births are going to be to low-income single-parent households. This is a reality that needs to be addressed.
I’m an advocate of personal responsibility, but we need to realize that people aren’t going to just stop having sex because their state passes a heartbeat bill. Real pro-life and pro-family policies should include free or very cheap contraception, sex education, and aid programs for poor families, not just bans on abortion. This is going to be expensive, but the states need to take responsibility for the children that are going to be born due to restrictive abortion laws. The cost of daycares and health insurance will probably be less than the social costs of high crime rates, drug epidemics, and the like.
Think of it as the social equivalent of Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn” rule for foreign policy: “You break it, you bought it.”
But we also need to encourage personal responsibility and good choices. For years now, I’ve tried to teach my children the Brookings Institute’s three simple rules for avoiding poverty and joining the middle class:
- Graduate from high school
- Work a full-time job
- Get married before having children and stay married
Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill of Brookings found that “people who followed all three of these rules had only a two percent chance of being in poverty and a 72 percent chance of joining the middle class (defined as above $55,000 in 2010).”
People are going to make mistakes. Sometimes there will be circumstances beyond your control that cause financial problems. I think that most Americans agree that safety nets are needed (if you don’t think that Republicans favor safety net programs, just start talking about cutting Social Security and Medicare in a right-leaning social media group), but it turns out that marriage is one of the best safety nets. Incentizing marriage is where we should be able to get a lot of bang for our buck.
As Melissa Kearney argues, “It’s not a moral argument. And there’s not a plausible way to have sufficient government transfers or community programs make up for an absent parent.”
Sometimes traditional norms are there for a reason. Marriage and two-parent families are a good example of that. As G.K. Chesterton once advised, “Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.”
We’ve taken down the fences that protected families and children and now we are learning why they were there. It’s going to be a challenge to put them back up.
OTHER BENEFITS OF MARRIAGE: I want to tout another benefit of marriage as well by giving a shout-out to my wife. I’ve mentioned my cancer diagnosis from earlier this year. If I had to deal with that alone, it would have been very difficult from both a financial and a mental perspective. I owe a lot to my wife for her help and support and for keeping me grounded as I went through my surgery and recovery.
(heavy sigh) Marriage, to the gov, is just a contract. It’s not approval or anything else. It’s a contract. People often get married to take advantage of that contract.
Part of the discussion about lack of marriage and divorce has to include domestic violence. Ease of child rearing outside of marriage/relationship is a massive boon to women with violent ex’s.Report
That married, two-parent families have enormous social advantages is, indeed, a “Duh.” Things have been set up that way, a few tax law quirks aside, for a long time. But does marriage cause stability, or does stability cause marriage, or is there a feedback loop?Report
There’s certainly a chicken or the egg component to it. Though I do find it striking how much of an international outlier the US is. It makes you wonder the relationship between it and the other stuff where we are outliers.Report
Looking seriously into those possible relationships would likely be more useful than restating the obvious.Report
“According to the American Psychological Association, approximately 40-50% of first marriages end in divorce. The divorce rate for second marriages is even higher, with approximately 60-67% of second marriages ending in divorce. Jan 9, 2023”
Any male should look at those odds and ask himself “Why the hell would I want to get married?” Especially if kids are involved, which is kinda the whole point of marriage, or paring off, when the laws are anti husband. “Nearly 70 percent of divorces are initiated by the wife.”
And let me be clear. My ex didn’t screw me over. We didn’t have kids. She wanted out and didn’t care about my money. I consider myself lucky.Report
To me the conclusion is less people need to get married have kids and more that there is a very serious caveat emptor on the alternatives. We are of course a small-l liberal, secular society. When it comes to choices of family and marriage the presumption really is and should be against the state. Where I think we may have gone astray culturally is the idea that any one thing is as good as anything else. The reality is that these structures have stood the test of time for a reason. While a different path may work for some people, and they must be allowed to pursue what works for them, the facts show that it will not for most, and their lives and the lives of their children will be worse for it. So do what you want but be clear eyed about the risks, and drop the wishful thinking, and blaming other people for life outcomes.Report
I don’t think we have gone astray as a culture. I think a large part of this being an ongoing issue in the United States is that Europe has in many ways gotten over the various social fights of the 1960s and we are still litigating them again and again and again. There are still social conservatives in Europe and in many other countries. Some of whom can be quite reactionary. However, the thing that makes the United States is that there are still a significant (though declining) number of religious conservatives (mainly Catholics and Evangelicals) compared to the rest of the world and population as a whole. This group seems to think it can still turn back time to varying degrees on various aspects of social liberalism which occurred in the 1960s. Namely, the open normalization of sex outside of marriage.*
There also seems to be a belief that all societal problems will undergo magic reversal if people married more. I am doubtful.
*Of course, plenty of people had sex before marriage long before the 1960s but there was a taboo in some quarters if you got caught and/or pregnant.Report
I think it’s a little more complicated than that. The contraception cat is out of the bag everywhere and I think that’s the case even in more traditional quarters. I still consider myself (a particularly bad, at times quite ambivalent) Catholic and opted for the Catholic school route for my kids. The vast, vast majority of the families there have 2-3 children, which is the same as the Catholic school I went to in more conservative times in the 80s and 90s. Obviously no one really knows what anyone else is doing in the bedroom but I think chances that everyone is strictly adhering to the rules and getting this outcome are very, very low. That’s especially when I hear my parents stories of their own experiences in Catholic school in the 60s and 70s, where much larger families were common.
I think the more interesting take is your comment below. Why is it that those of us living productively in the moderate, blue culture have become so afraid to acknowledge that it really is the best way to do things, for most people, most of the time? And why is it that we will all at minimum by example impart to our children that this is the best way to do things, for most people, most of the time, but tend to cringe a little when others make that point to a broader audience?
That’s not a case for turning back the clock which is never going to happen anyway. It’s a legitimate question about whether the natural embarrassment of appearing judgmental, especially when it comes to those less fortunate is the right inclination. Is it really empathetic to nod along to approaches we would never take ourselves in life, as if it is all the same, or are we being cowards? I am not sure I know the answer.Report
I think the more interesting take is your comment below. Why is it that those of us living productively in the moderate, blue culture have become so afraid to acknowledge that it really is the best way to do things, for most people, most of the time? And why is it that we will all at minimum by example impart to our children that this is the best way to do things, for most people, most of the time, but tend to cringe a little when others make that point to a broader audience?
Besides an aversion to restating the obvious, it is likely to be ineffective, and possibly insulting to hector those who are probably not doing the right thing because it is generally harder for them to do it than it is for us.Report
Look, I am at heart a live and let live kind of guy. I don’t think all of society’s ills are going to be fixed by hectoring people about their personal failings, in particular when it comes to doing things they may well be ill equipped to do. What I don’t like though is shying away from well established facts, especially the inconvenient ones.Report
Because we do a lot of things that conservatives still do not want to admit support of.
Liberal bougie types tend to have sex before marriage, cohabitate before marriage, and we often don’t always get married. Some sections of liberal bougie culture are also starting to openly look into consensual non-monogamy and throples (I hate this word.)
TL/DR, we are not quite advocating for what the conservatives want or demand.Report
Sex and cohabitation before marriage I think are just baked into the cake now. However I think the other stuff is unlikely to have staying power, or to work particularly well as a social or legal norm, particularly with children. It will be mostly experimentation among people well placed not to suffer much hardship from it, but it will become very obvious why it is a bad idea to anyone serious about starting a family. It seems to me that there is a middle path here that accepts the material components of the sexual revolution, but also understands the limitations required by good sense. There were a lot of experimental ideas in the 60s too in this area that also failed and I see no reason to think it would be different now. There’s a reason (really a lot of reasons) every time you read about hippie communes with nonstandard coupling rules they end up not working out.Report
Its almost axiomatic that poor people tend to have messy disordered lives.
Although we can state upfront that most people, rich or poor, lead relatively ordered lives and enjoy stable networks of relationships, the rate of disorder among poor people consistently skews higher.
Higher rates of substance abuse, marriage failure, and crime, with lower rates of education and general performance.
And this has been consistently true throughout history and across cultures.
Trouble is, we don’t know exactly how to fix this beyond exhortation. We know that higher rates of general prosperity helps, more access to services such as education and job training helps, but in the end there is a set of people who make poor choices and experience bad life outcomes.
We also know that the consequences of these choices don’t adhere to just the ones making them. A poorly performing or absent father begets a troubled child who inflicts their pain on society as a whole. We can lock the child up, but not until they have wreaked harm and trauma on all of us.Report
A lot of middle class and upper middle class people act like one false step could destroy everything they built up. That doesn’t prevent them from making lots of false steps but the fear of a little error causing everything to fall down is there. For the really wealthy, they basically believe that their money and status protects them. The poor on the other hand have a very fatalistic it won’t get better worldview and certainly not better than the period in your late teens and early twenties, so they live carpe diem. It wouldn’t surprise me if the poor that manage to get out of poverty somehow think in the one false step narrative of the middle class.8
*On the other blog, a poster noted how many of the people she knew during her childhood and teen years did all sorts of wild things as teenagers but freak out if their kids down something a little wild. Said poster also noted that this fear isn’t exactly without reason.Report
“Morals are for the middle classes. The poor can’t afford them and the rich don’t need them.”-Bernard Shaw. I think Mr. Shaw was basically capturing this. A lot of middle-class and upper-middle class people believe or know that they can lose almost everything through a misstep or two.Report
On the other hand, the poor could be adamant imposers of social conservatism and traditional morality more so than the middle and upper middle classes. I’m not sure that Shaw was entirely correct. I do note that there does seem to be a type of middle class or upper middle class liberal that doesn’t really like the sort of cheating the poor do to make their life easier.Report
I wouldn’t say “the” rich or poor act in a certain way. There are insulated rich and non-aspirational poor who might fall into those stereotypes, but really how common are they? Probably not very.Report
The problem isn’t that some individuals are going to make some poor choices and experience bad life outcomes no matter what. The real problem is that plenty of other people suffer along with them. Some humans for lack of a better term are wild and don’t like anybody or anything imposing limits on their behavior.Report
I have had 5 relatives get pregnant and then not get married because of the government’s incentives. Four of them eventually did.
The starkest was my PhD Engineer super-smart brother who is more of a math guy than I am. He walked me through why he wasn’t going to get married yet and it was purely a numbers argument.
This was maybe 5 years ago.Report
Thesis: Conservatives still hate that upper-middle class bougie liberals are among the most well-adjusted and least dysfunctional members of society despite being largely secular (or at least non-Evangelical) and also not having taboos about sex or cohabitation before marriage. I think you can make an argument that sex and cohabitation before marriage is prudent (you learn whether you truly want each other and can stand each other for extended periods of time). And then they see the lives of many in their own bases are absolute messes.Report
If you look at suicide rates, mental illness, happiness, et cetera, liberals are basket cases compared to their conservative counterparts. It’s so commonly identified in studies that it’s not even debated.Report
*Users added context they thought people might want to know*
No support for such a spectacular claim has been offered.Report
I don’t know that there’s good data looking at individual political affiliations, but overall mortality, and in particular, deaths from flu, cancer, heart disease, pneumonia, chronic, respiratory diseases, injury, and suicide, etc., are significantly higher in counties that tend to vote Republican than in counties that tend vote Democratic, and the gap has been growing for at least a decade.
https://www.bmj.com/content/377/bmj-2021-069308Report
There are a ton of studies on both sides proclaiming that [the researcher’s team] is healthier.
I suspect these studies tend to say more about the researcher than anything else.Report
I’ll need supporting documentation on this.Report
Irony is dead.Report
I did a quick google search and found various studies proclaiming that [team] was healthier. A quick scan of the links showed they were split on which side was better.Report
OK, I see what happened. We switched from well-adjusted to healthy. Neither Saul nor I was talking about physical health.Report
In terms of “what beliefs lead to mental health”, I’d guess anything that leads to lower levels of alcohol and tobacco use.
Big picture we have noisy data but trying to parse this as [one side or the other] is a mistake. Each side is a conglomeration of multiple groups with multiple beliefs and those sub-groups switch sides every now and then.Report
https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/why-depression-rates-are-higher-among-liberals
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unique-everybody-else/202103/personality-traits-mental-illness-and-ideology
Both seem neutral and in agreement. They seem to treat this as common knowledge.
I’ll admit considered putting up a third link, on the subject of suicide and religion, but I didn’t for a few reasons. Suicidality is a measurement of things other than mental illness, such as ethics, availability of guns, and feelings of acceptance. There are some complicated interconnections there with regards to religion.
Give me a few studies showing that liberals are mentally healthier, and I’ll accept your premise. Note that I didn’t have to dig deep into Google to find these. The subject of white liberal girls and mental illness is a hot topic.Report
I would just like to point out that there’s no evidence of causation here, and it’s entirely possible that the reason that people with poor mental health are more likely to be liberal is the same reason that disabled people are more likely to be liberal:
They are treated better by the left in general, and the left is not trying to take away their health insurance, and the left at least _pretends_ to care about them and help them. (With the caveat they don’t really do that, but lip service is still better than outright hostility.)Report
Yeah, mixing up inputs and outputs is something that happens a lot.Report
I’m not arguing causality, only that Saul’s thesis is contradicted by facts.Report
First I need to understand if these are the generally accepted views of experts in the field or if these two studies are outliers and not well regarded by peers.
Second, the first link suggests that liberals worry more about “stress-inducing topics like racial injustice, income inequality, gun violence, and climate change”
Which seems to me at least, that the depression is well-justified and indicative of a well ordered mind.Report
Yeah, so this is going to be another one of those things like that time you asked for a source on crime statistics and we gave you Literally The US FBI and you tried to claim that they weren’t experts in the fieldReport
I’m just asking if we should trust this source.Report
Asking for sources works every time, though. You just have to find a reason to reject every single source given to you.
“I don’t trust the government.”
“I don’t have the training to read what I asked for.”
“I will not read what you provide.”
No matter what, you get to say “I have not seen the evidence that you say exists!”Report
Do you accept Pinky’s source?Report
I haven’t looked at it so I can’t say whether or not I accept it.Report
In my purely personal and anecdotal experience, I can’t say I see much difference between religious and secular, liberal and conservative people in terms of mental health or overall life outcomes and happiness.Report
Same here. A lot of people like to imagine that their side is the happier and more mentally healthy side but informal evidence shows this not to be the case.Report
I honestly think, though, that this is the existential crisis facing religions.
When you look across modern secular society at the “nones”, the people living without any sort of formal religion and they seem perfectly happy and content and well adjusted it poses a difficult question for the religious.
What exactly does it have to offer?
If you imagine some eager missionary attempting to evangelize to todays yoots, what would the missionary offer them, what would be the elevator pitch?Report
I think the jury is still out on that. My (admittedly anecdotal) perception is that the most secular people are often replacing things once filled by religion with forms of pseudo mysticism and vaguely political esoterica.
However that stuff lacks a real communal component or any tradition bigger than the individual, which I suspect renders it pretty thin gruel for the spiritual sustenance most people seem to naturally seek, even without any formal religious commitments.
I think the answer will come once the boomers are mostly gone, and we have big cohorts of Millennials reaching old age that followed divergent paths. My bet is that the people that stayed within a stone’s throw of traditional lifestyles and commitments will find themselves happier, and more fulfilled with their lives but it is totally possible I’ll be proven wrong.Report
“Tradition” is another term for “solution to a problem you forgot you had”.
Maybe ChatGPT will help, though.Report
Heh, the tradition of having no tradition and therefore needing a machine to agglomerate one for you.Report
There are lots of many different varieties of non-religious people. In the not to distant past, atheists and agnostics imagined that the post-religion world would be filled with rational and logical people that don’t believe anything superstitious at all. This turns out not to be the case. Most non-religious people still have the emotional and psychological needs that religion fulfilled and turn to what is often called woo in lesser or greater doses as a replacement. Whether this is better or not is up to debate.Report
I think this is right. Religion is legitimately challenged by serious minds, in a gentler way by Carl Sagan, in a harsher, more aggressive way by Richard Dawkins. But that’s not really what’s going on with most people that have given up or never been a part of organized religion.Report
The problem facing organized religion is the vast increase in information flow. It’s easier to be exposed to other ways of thinking. It’s easier to find out the religious leaders are made of clay.
And if you leave the church you don’t indoctrinate your children.
Big picture organized religion needs to figure out their economic niche. Various other groups have taken over what they used to do, they’re left with entertainment identity, and being a social club.Report
I think there’s some truth to that. I also think that at some point there will be some reconsideration of whether trauma informed tarot readings are enough to get people through the inherent sadness of human life. That’s especially so in your older years if you’ve made the decision not to marry or have kids, your friends are drifting away, and the night life has ceased being fun and inviting.
So certainly an opening for religion to make a comeback, but they have to play their own cards right, particularly with point of emphasis. It isn’t going to work if the perception is that they are obsessed with bedroom behavior that all societies will eventually make peace with as they get richer.Report
A massive part of current religion is “identity” and finding an enemy is a big part of that.
That’s worked for them for a long time.Report
I assume you meant “entertainment, identity, and being a social club”. And identity isn’t a small thing. But you can’t leave out ethics, beliefs, and sense of purpose, all of which a sizable percentage of the population find in religion.Report
RE: Ethics
I see no evidence religion has anything to do with ethics. They like to claim that a lot, but that’s part of them trying to claim to be the source of all good things.
The various sex scandals, especially the ones involving children, showcase that. Similarly historical religious support for slavery is a thing.
If you’re claiming to both be an expert in ethics and also giving a pass to your subordinates sexually assaulting children then the first claim is dubious.
RE: Beliefs
I’m not sure how “beliefs” matter or even if this is true. I grew up religious, ask 12 people in the same church about God or how the metaphysics is supposed to work and you’re going to get 12 different answers.
Most of the religious don’t know the details of their own religion. Identity and comradery do the heavy lifting.
RE: Sense of purpose
This is a thing. I’m not sure it’s enough since the rest of that package insists on it’s own facts.Report
I didn’t say ethical behaviour, I said ethics, which are a code of conduct.
For beliefs, you may get differences among the Twelve (and there’s always one bad apple!), but there will be more similarities than differences, and the beliefs will in general be influenced by the religion’s teaching.Report
I find your take on this pretty hard to understand given your usual emphasis on the importance of culture.Report
Far as I can tell, Religion is a tool used for power and social cohesion. So the phrase “god wants” can always be replaced with “the person saying this wants this and you don’t get to question it”.
God always wanting what the priests want is a mess from an ethical stand point because at best the priests are no more ethical than the rest of us.
At worst they know darn well that praying for health doesn’t do anything and forgiving sex predators doesn’t cure them.
Making false claims is “fraud” if we take religion seriously which the religious are always claiming we should.
I fail to see how this mechanic “creates ethics”. Add to that religion’s constant need for a harmless enemy and there are expected problems.Report
Religion isn’t a panacea. I have my issues with it including my own. But what you’re describing here seems more like an evil caricature of all the bad. I mean, I’ve been going to Catholic mass on and off all my life and I don’t think I’ve once heard any talk about any kind of enemy among my fellow man. Their short comings have been very different.
Anyway you have good and bad. The good can instill values worth having, and help people learn to hold themselves accountable. Where do you think culture and values come from?Report
I’ve read the observation somewhere, I think it might have been Dreher or Douthat, that the successors to the religious, the nones, are emphatically not like the pagan peoples the Christians converted to Christianity in the first place. They’re mentally armored against the traditional modes of proselytizing with cynicism and memory of their immediate lived history and that strikes me as correct.
Which means that it’ll take more than the boomers passing from the stage. It’ll require that the children or grandchildren of the nones be approaching the stage and have little to no lived experience of the foibles and failings of organized religions and, instead, the foibles and failings of the nones will loom large in their minds and they may be open to the pitch of organized religion again.
But barring some kind of cultural memory obliterating event or cataclysm, the new organized religions will need to have some answers on a bunch of tough questions that they haven’t tackled yet. Otherwise I don’t see them having much purchase with the old doctrine.Report
I think we will see a lot of X-adjacent religions masquerading a X. Unitarianism for Everybody.
So like the white guy you know who calls himself a “Buddhist”? You’re going to see more of that. More Islam (but it will be an *INCLUSIVE* Islam). “I’m more of a Pantheist, you know? There are small gods *EVERYWHERE*.”
And astrology will take off. I mean *REALLY* take off. Well, the Linda Goodman version, anyway.
The Orthodox and the Catholics should be fine, mostly… but the Protestants will be decimated outside of the Megachurches.Report
We’ll see. I wouldn’t put good odds on the megachurches personally. And while the liberal feel good religions seem to make sense on paper the actual real world outcomes seem to be that when you water that religion down enough to be feel good universalist then people just decide they’d rather have their Sundays to themselves and not bother at all.Report
“That’s what makes Islam so great! I just have to pray five times a day! I pray all the time!”Report
The villain of most sermons I’ve ever heard is either me or the priest.Report
Religion teaches people to believe/accept things as true without question because authority figures say it is. This seldom works out better than just teaching them to think.
It’s an easily misused tool.
Gays, Jews, pregnant women, and other religions might disagree.
What “good” values do you mean?
If it’s something like “don’t kill” then you need to point out how atheists and other religions are way more murderous. If it’s something like “opposes slavery” then the Bible supports slavery.
I see lots of efforts by the religious to claim credit over everything good and refuse blame over everything bad. If we insist on evidence and point out that people killing each other over holy land involves religion, then the picture looks worse.Report
You have obviously never met a Jesuit. We may be too far apart on this to have a meaningful conversation. All I can say is that there are intellectual traditions founded in religion which go beyond Hollywood depictions of American tent revivals.
Which again, doesn’t mean there aren’t flaws. All religions have them, from various institutional malpractices some of which are horrendous, and are dealing with challenges brought on by advances in science and the Death of God. But if your whole criticism is religious people have done some very bad things, including in the name of their religions, you aren’t really engaging with the question of its (potential) larger social value.Report
But I need religion to be Caricature Southern Baptist for my hate of it to be justified!Report
One of the things I appreciate about this site is that there have generally been a number of people even on the left half who have belonged to or spent significant time in a church. There of course have been a few commenters & posters who treat “religion” as if it’s equivalent to Jerry Falwell, the Ayatollah, and the Crusades, but those comments get plenty of pushback even from other liberals. My own long experience in our mainstream protestant church in a blue state is that it’s too liberal for my taste (though I still attend religiously).Report
I grew up Protestant then converted to Catholic to get married.
After years and a lot of soul searching I realized magic isn’t a thing.Report
“Magic isn’t a thing” is such a useless simplistic way to talk about the huge topic of religion that I have to assume you weren’t seriously engaging, or are just overgeneralizing from a little bit of experience.Report
In Dark’s defense I think that at least goes down a more merited path i.e. the question of whether it is rational and/or dangerous to believe in forces unlikely to ever be proven or disproven by the scientific method. I don’t think that’s really what we were talking about above but it’s something all religions and religious people have to deal with.Report
I shouldn’t try to comment here when I’m at work — that was an over-reaction on my part. But my position is that a discussion of religion needs to cover much more than belief — religion as practiced is at least as much about community as about believing in supernatural entities. I suspect half the people in my church wouldn’t even say that they believe in an actually-existing God — going to church is also about belonging to an intentional community, providing a positive environment for raising children, weekly encouragement to be a better person and to deal with life’s challenges, etc. This is why arguments that don’t go beyond “Flying Spaghetti Monster” irritate me.Report
I am definitely with you in finding those sorts of arguments to be non responsive. And while I think there probably are some pretty petty, mean spirited strains of religion out there that I am sure can be stifling and oppressive, especially if you’re someone in a small town who already doesn’t fit in for whatever reason, I still think intellectual honesty requires taking on the steel man version, not the straw man.Report
Fine. Deep dive time.
Magic clearly doesn’t exist, at all, at any level.
Fortune 500 companies don’t have departments devoted to prayer or getting supernatural assistance. Nation states don’t do anything useful with this. A 1% advantage is a license to print money in the Stock Market but ruthless, amoral, well funded entities don’t do anything with it.
So when Priests offer to pray for you to help you get a job, or to heal a sick child, or for anything that is measurable in the real world including luck and statistics, they’re offering nothing. If they’re accepting money to do this and claiming there’s a real effect, then that’s fraud.
If we look at old history of the church then we’re looking at power games and corruption. The church is a worldly organization and always has been. It does what is good for the church.
The entire setup is designed to profit from ignorant superstitious people and they do better if the people are kept ignorant and superstitious.
That’s a toxic incentive, and they can’t get away from it because they’ve lost most of the other reasons for them to exist. They’re not the back bone of society for organization, education, and knowledge anymore.
Treat the church as a normal worldly organization without the assumptions that it’s somehow responsible for everything good and not responsible for everything bad, and it’s not even clear that it’s influence is positive.
Society seems to benefit, a lot, by removing religion from the government. Just like we benefit a lot by removing it from science.
For ethics, “the priests get to make stuff up that benefits them” probably isn’t the way to go, nor is black letter Bible because that brings us back to slavery.
As society gets more ethical, richer, and more educated, the level of religion goes down.Report
You’re using a specific term here, “magic”, so let’s look at it.
Magic presumes an exchange of something for something else. Pour milk on a statue, find true love. Successful magic would be quantifiable. It wouldn’t be scientific in the sense of reasonable, but it would be scientific in the sense of measurable. Magic implies power on the petitioner’s side as well as the petitioned.
Christianity for one has never espoused magic. Christianity believes in the supernatural. There is no claim of repeatability, nor of petitioners’ power. You can say that nothing exists beyond the natural, but that statement can’t be proven. You can say that you don’t accept the existence of anything that can’t be measured, but that’s a statement of epistemology. You can say that you believe that nothing exists that can’t be measured, and yeah, ok, but I believe different.
The above isn’t technicality. It’s part of the historical faith. Christianity has always warned against superstition but has a strong belief in the value of intercessory prayer. This is subtle, and it doesn’t help to describe it inaccurately.Report
Every miracle in the Bible is a claim that magic exists.
Every prayer for someone because they’re in trouble is an effort to create magic. This includes every faith healing.
Every time someone has thanked god for something that happened in the real world they are claiming god magically helped them.
No, the burden isn’t on me to prove dragons, fairies, the tens of thousands of gods, or other magical entities don’t exist.
The claim that magic exists is yours, I am pointing out the world doesn’t seem to operate that way and makes a lot more sense if all these claims are simply wrong.
The weird part is most people, despite claiming that they truly believe they have omnipotent supernatural assistance on call, live as though they don’t.Report
I think I pretty clearly demonstrated the difference between magic and the supernatural using standard definitions. As for epistemologies, I haven’t asked you to prove yours, nor am I going to try to prove mine.Report
Grading your own papers again?Report
You must have grown up, converted, married, soul searched, then left religion before you turned 8. Because by that age or maybe younger we were encouraged to learn and ask questions. True story, I was around that age when I argued with my CCD teacher over the Immaculate Conception. He didn’t persuade me, and I spent years stumbling over it. Fortunately there is a paper trail thousands of years long on the question, and I was finally able to work it out.
What you’re describing is a blind faith in what a leader tells you about faith and morals. That’s not the case for any of the Creedal branches of Christianity. It’s possible you grew up in a whack-a-mole Protestant church then had an incompetent instructor for your conversion, but that just means you’re unfamiliar with Christianity as believed and practiced by most of its members. And if you want to say this is a “no true Scotsman” fallacy, well there are people who aren’t Scotsmen, and you’re describing a dark-skinned hula dancer or something.Report
So how did you “work out” the Immaculate Conception? It takes only a few seconds’ thought to figure out that an omnipotent deity can, by definition, do any damn thing He wants, so an IC is trivially possible. But did it happen? If you have a way of knowing that that the rest of humanity doesn’t, please share.Report
One of my criticisms is it enables those people.
It also creates conflict for the sake of conflict. It also educates people that authoritarianism is a good thing. It also teaches that belief trumps facts and magic is real.
And what is that specifically?Report
I think organized religion has a high body count historically due to it often having no distinction from political power and because the absence of religion wasn’t something contemplated at scale. I think the proof of that is the combination of increasing peace in the West as Church and State have separated, and the fact that the most authoritarian regimes of recent history were either atheist or rejected or were not a part of Abrahamic religious traditions.
I think the larger social value is to instill virtues, that even in the absence of the supernatural (not that I am totally discounting that) are more likely lead to happiness, human flourishing, and a morally just way of life. The absence of that is just as likely to justify selfishness, narcissism, and nihilism as it is a rationalist utopia. My view is that all the negatives you’re associating with religion are better understood as part of the natural human condition. The question is whether religion is also a force for tempering those inclinations even if it has also been an avenue for exercising them. The other question is what you unleash, and grant license for once you get rid of it.Report
Communism works very well as a religion pretending to be an economic theory. It isn’t Abrahamic but it has…
– Assertions claimed as Truth
– Doubt punished as crime
– Dissent characterized as Evil
– Folklore represented as History
– Superstition held to be Science
– Piousness conflated with Morality
Very, very True. However we give a lot more rope to religions than we do other groups.
If we believed companies were the creators of ethics, subject to divine oversight, and able to punish us after we’re dead, then we would be giving them more leeway to grift and behave unethically.
Would we ask this question for other easily abusable tools?
The answer should be that the usual rules always apply. So churches need to be mandatory reporters of sex crimes and can’t be accepting money for bogus health services.Report
I don’t see how it’s fair to count against religion a political system that expressly rejects religion, at least as traditionally understood.
And yes I think we ask that question for all kinds of tools. I don’t think anyone would question whether Penn State provides value, even if it as an institution also protected Jerry Sandusky.Report
This is like claiming Iran’s gov isn’t a strike against religion because it’s a pollical system.
Many religions don’t want to deal with other religions and strive to hobble or even outlaw them.
“Rejecting” all religions except for your own doesn’t mean your belief system isn’t a religion.
If memory serves they got a Billion dollar or so judgement against them.Report
I think that stretches the word “religion” well beyond any ability to have a discrete conversation about it. Religion may contain abstract theories and abstractions but every abstraction is not a religion and it certainly isn’t organized religion which is what the discussion is about. I mean, is capitalism religion? Is liberalism? Conservatism? I guess one could make that argument but at that point I think we have ceased to be talking about religion as commonly understood.
And yea Penn State got sued and so to has the Catholic Church. Every organization gets sued eventually, doesn’t mean they have no value.Report
Sounds like DM’s true concern is about “fundamentalism” in general — religious fundamentalism is basically the OG manifestation but it can apply in many areas. That’s an opinion I might agree with, but it’s referring to a general human trait and not specific to religion.
One could argue that religion is more apt to be associated with it, and/or that it’s more damaging when associated with religious beliefs than in other areas, and/or that the benefits of religion are not adequate to balance out the ill effects of religious fundamentalism — all of these would require some comparative evidence though.Report
Certainly possible that’s the disconnect.Report
If I replace the word “religion” with “ideology that includes magic thinking that is divorced with obvious reality which we’re supposed to accept on faith”, then I still have the same arguments.
All religions have this, Communism has this, that is the problematic part. There is no “god” in communism but the level of problematic thinking is so high that there might as well be.Report
Even the unique definition of magic that you’ve been using doesn’t fit communism.Report
Lenin’s magic was the idea that miracles are brought about by groups of people rather than individuals. The superpowers of the magicians of revolution come from solidarity and comradeship.
Communism is a political and economic ideology that advocates for a classless system in which the means of production are owned communally and private property is nonexistent or severely curtailed. A communist society is characterized by common ownership of the means of production with free access to the articles of consumption. It is classless, stateless, and moneyless.
Christians wait for the second coming. Communists wait for that magic moment when everyone unifies like ants and gives up any desire for class or money.
Obviously the reality of Communism is vastly different from the theory. Just like a society which claims to have miracles on tap won’t rely on the Garden of Eden to feed it’s people nor will they use pure prayer to replace doctors.Report
No, he was just wrong, not thinking magically. Economic determinism isn’t magic, it’s a psychological / sociological theory that explicitly denies magic.Report
25th anniversary next month.
The main thing I’d say is that marriage is pretty good and it’s pretty good in *VERY* different ways than I thought it would be pretty good when I got married.
A lot of people get married thinking that it’ll be lots of fun and hanging from the chandeliers and all of the best parts of dating minus some of the sanctions against a subset of the best parts of dating.
And, sure, it’s sometimes like that for about five or six years.
But, for the most part, marriage is like running a small non-profit.
And it’s about as exciting as running a small non-profit.
And most of the narratives out there about marriage emphasize the extremes of the hanging from the chandeliers versus the whole Rod Stewart saying “I’m never getting married again… next time I meet a woman I hate, I’ll just buy her a house” thing.
But there’s not a whole lot of prep work for the whole “small non-profit” thing.
And that’s a societal failure.Report
I think we’d be better off if people got married right out of high school, had kids right away, lived with their parents until their early thirties, and *then* went to college and got a job.Report
That’s a new one to me. The idea is they hang around with their kids until the kids are almost teens and then do all the learning and career development stuff while the kids go to high school?Report
No idea how you’d ever implement it but it isn’t the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.Report
People would have to choose to do it, have considerable success doing it and then reliably produce better tempered, happier, more productive descendants and it’d spread organically. Doubtful that it actually would work, of course, but an entertaining thought experiment.Report
“The idea is they hang around with their kids until the kids are almost teens and then do all the learning and career development stuff while the kids go to high school?”
Yes, exactly.
Having very-young kids is mostly about having the energy to stay ahead of them (or, rather, to run behind them with a bag of snacks and a mop). You have kids in your twenties and by the time you’re starting to slow down they’re starting to need less immediate hand-holding; and by that point you’re ready for some heavy head-stuff yourself, having (presumably) seen a few things go by and gotten a better sense of what works and what doesn’t.Report
It’s a novel concept and it’s the first I’ve read it anywhere so well done.Report
There’s actually two different things behind conflated here: Adults in household and marriage.
The US is near the top in single-parent households, but actually has a pretty high marriage rate for the Western world. France’s marriage rate is 3/5ths of ours, but the percentage of single-parent households are almost identical. They just have more parents living together unmarried.
And, incidentally, France used to have a _lot less_ single parent households than us, and that number has skyrocketed to the same as ours because France got a lot poorer. In fact, the increase is very directly correlated to people who rent vs people who own their own homes. (You know, if anyone actually cares about fixing the fundamental problems of society that _cause_ this setup, instead of just complaining about it.)
But, anyway, this entire discussion seems to have conflated ‘single-parent household’ with ‘unmarried parents’, and those are not the same thing at all.Report
Do you know what the absolute best thing you can do, something that is almost trivially easy and saves a ton of money and other people don’t even _notice_ it?
Stop buying expensive diamond rings.
That entire industry is a scam, it has always been a scam, it is a scam that has impoverished and done _even worse_ to a lot of very poor countries, and it is an utterly pointless deliberate market manipulation. (They deliberately release only a set amount of diamonds a year.)
You can buy manufactured diamonds that identical, literally identical, for incredibly cheap, if you want a diamond ring, and there’s not even a good reason to have a diamond ring vs. a ring that is meaningful to the people involved.
And the thing about how all this works is…it’s pretty much in the hands of women, and even if women don’t care about it, the man often doesn’t _know_ this. So…I actually urge women, and people raising up women, to think about this, and to tell their partners, that they _don’t_ want a traditional diamond ring, one hauled out of the grounds by poorly paid (hopefully paid at all) workers in some third world country, handed over to some incredibly wealthly man who has paid off the right people to end up with ownership of these natural resources, and then, via a massive PR campaign and market manipulation, gotten people to extremely overpay for something that is now trivially to create.
Or, to put it another way: The memories of a extravagant wedding might, or might not, be worth it. I’m not the boss of people, and memories are important. But having that specific chunk of carbon vs. one made another way sure as hell is not.Report
Ok..caveat. All this happened in the late 90s. Ex and I got married. Since my family was a thousand miles south and couldn’t fly well, and her’s were local and couldn’t fly, we eloped. Went to the Caribbean, got married on the beach. We were in our late 20s/early 30s. Wife had a dress made-cost 100 dollars. I bought a suit-200 dollars. Got married on the beach, honeymoon where we were. Total cost of wedding and honeymoon @ 3.5K. I lucked out on the ring because the wife was small and a small diamond looked YUGE on her finger. She didn’t care about diamonds, we just ended up with one and some other stones on each side. No drama, no issues, had fun. Wedding took less time than the dozen or so pictures we had taken by the photographer, who’s cost was included in the wedding. So, the current cost of that wedding was, say 6K.
Marry someone who doesn’t want / care about the “princess wedding”.Report
Anyone here ever been a single parent?Report
Yes. We’ve been separated for about two years now.
I’m down to one kid and she’s high school age. I have the kid 100%.
For me the big difference is it’s more risky.
I knew that when I moved so we are next to the HS and she can walk.Report
How are you defining risk in this situation?Report
If something bad happens to one adult then the other can step in if there are two parents. If something happens to me, my backup is a 16 year old who doesn’t have her driver’s license yet.
I have a very flexible job (I’m an R&D Software Engineer), can work from home, and can drop everything to ride to the rescue if she needs to me at school.
Change that job to something with an hour commute or something that isn’t as flexible and this gets a lot harder. If I have a mental health problem then things will suck pretty badly for her.Report
Getting married is not a matter of simply deciding, one day, to get married, and then going out and picking a marriage off the marriage tree. You generally need to find another person who you want to marry, and who wants to marry you, and then get married. If you want a marriage that brings all the benefits that Kearney describes in a book, the person who you marry needs to be able to up to the task of providing the emotional, practical, and economic contributions that make those benefits happen.
Finding the right partner is not entirely trivial. A lot of the social concerns that conservatives have been quick to point out in recent decades, and which land more heavily on people with lower incomes, make finding that sort of partner even harder.
If you’re bowling alone, you aren’t going to be meeting a future spouse at the bowling alley.
The underlying assumption of a lot of the pro-marriage discourse assumes that marriage would provide the same sort of benefit to everyone that gets married, but this is not a foregone conclusion, and it might well be that the people who would benefit the least overlap greatly with the people who choose not to get married. Indeed, it would be kinda weird if those people weren’t less likely to get married!
The deteriorating social norm against having kids outside of marriage is doubtless connected with the increase in single women having kids, but how many of the marriages that aren’t happening are the ones that would have happened not due to practical or economic benefits, but simply due to the need to avoid social stigma?
At a certain point, “Why don’t youReport