Marching Past & Present
What Four Parades Reveal About the Future
by Allan C. Carlson
In 1916, the Children's Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor, the National Congress of Mothers, and the General Federation of Women's Clubs sponsored National Baby Week, March 4–11. Ten million women and six-and-a-half million preschool children took part in lectures, baby-care seminars, good-natured "Best Mother" contests, and orations celebrating motherhood as a sacred vocation. Most visually, there were "Baby Parades," occurring in 4,300 cities and towns. As one historian (Molly Ladd-Taylor) remarks, "Like military heroes, mothers with infants in arms paraded down Main Street to the applause of flag waving townspeople."
A century or so later, Americans recognize June as "Pride Month." This is a time, President Joe Biden tells us, "to recall the trials [that the] Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer community has endured and to rejoice in the triumphs of trailblazing individuals who have bravely fought . . . for full equality." Again most visibly, there are grand parades, this time featuring floats, exotic dancers, drag queens, amplified music, and contingents from the United Church of Christ, the Episcopalians, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the Unitarians. These parades occur in over a hundred American cities, drawing huge crowds. Five million persons attended the 2019 New York City march alone; three million in San Francisco; two million in Chicago. Mothers with babies are not invited.
Astonishing Shifts
This circumstance reflects a new moral order. For example, how should one react to the news that the organizers of the New York Pride Parade have banned police from marching in their event through 2025? Should a traditionalist be happy about this? Or sad? For my part, I am only bewildered, for the judgments needed here involve an altogether alien moral calculus.
Moreover, this contrast in parades reflects an astonishing shift in national priorities and identity—matters captured in grim statistics. Even in pre-Covid 2018, the U.S. marriage rate had fallen to 6.5 marriages per 1,000 persons, by far the lowest figure ever recorded. The number for 2020 is expected to plunge much further. Meanwhile, the average age for those entering first marriage has soared: for men, from 22 in 1975 to 30 in 2019; for women, from 20 to 28. And over a third of American adults are now expected never to marry, compared to a mere five percent in 1975.
Turning to fertility, as late as 2009 the United States was still exceptional in the Western world for having a total fertility rate near the generational replacement level of an average 2.1 births per woman. By 2020, that number had fallen to 1.6, with the USA thus joining the circle of demographic loser nations.
Not coincidentally, I believe, American religiosity has declined sharply as well. While statistics are, at best, frail reflections of belief, they do capture certain changes in behavior. Last March, the Gallup Poll found that only 47 percent of Americans now claim membership in a church, synagogue, or mosque, down from 70 percent in 1999 (a figure then largely unchanged since the question was first asked in 1937). Among so-called Millennials, the figure is a dismal 36 percent. Not surprisingly, church closings now outnumber church openings: Protestants recorded a net loss of 1,500 churches in 2019 alone; the number of Catholic parishes has fallen by 12 percent since 2000—with post-Covid numbers still to come.
Parallel with Quebec
Is there a historical parallel to this ongoing American cultural breakdown? Perhaps.
Consider Quebec. Here, I again compare parades. In 2007, I served on the faculty of an Intercollegiate Studies Institute Honors Summer School, held in Quebec City, the provincial capital. On the walls of the hotel conference room where we met for the lecture sessions were photographs from the city's past. Many dated from the 1920s and 1930s, showing great phalanxes of priests, women religious, and monks marching in quasi-military fashion through the walled city's streets, perhaps for a Corpus Christi procession.
Allan C. Carlson is the author of numerous books, including Family Questions: Reflections on the American Social Crisis and The American Way: Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity. He attends St. Paul Lutheran Church in Rockford, Illinois. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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