Marriage Fading
Revolutionaries to the Romantics: Drop Dead
We Christians in the West are suffering a dreadful crisis in vocations, dreadful but forgotten, though how we can be so oblivious to it is hard for me to fathom, since it is all around us. Perhaps that itself is the reason. It is too near. It may be too painfully near. We are all implicated in it. We are like a man who forgets where his checkbook is because he would rather not look inside it. The crisis I am talking about is in the vocation to marriage.
On Thursday, October 30, 1975, one of the most famous headlines in American journalism appeared on the front page of the New York Daily News. It read simply, “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” The city was nearly bankrupt from its own bad fiscal policies, and it had appealed to the federal government to bail it out. The appeal was couched in terms of a threat. If New York City went under, Mayor Abe Beame and Governor Hugh Carey suggested, the economy of the whole nation would stagger. But the president, Gerald Ford, would have none of it, and he bristled at that hint of economic blackmail. He did promise that Washington would make sure that urgent and necessary services, not including public education, would continue.
New Yorkers, predictably enough, reacted with anger and resentment. It probably cost Ford his chance to be re-elected in 1976, when he lost New York and its 41 electoral votes to Jimmy Carter, by a slim margin. But he did what he believed was right, avoiding what would have been thought by many, at that time, to be constitutionally impermissible.
The Lonely Revolution
Why I bring this up will soon be clear. The situation applies, in a peculiarly vicious and treacherous way, to what is going on now with marriage and the churches, both in America and in the Western world generally. But first let me make this clear: if grace perfects nature, if the seedbed of the Church is the ecclesia domestica, the church of the well-ordered home and hearth, then the land has been put to the torch, and the swamp nearby has been allowed to breach its banks and to spill its filth into what used to be green fields.
The statistics are horrible. There is no way to paste a smile on them. I will use my own church for an example. In 1970, there were more than 426,300 Catholic marriages in the U.S., then a country of 205.1 million people. In 2021, there were 97,200 Catholic marriages, in a country of 329.5 million people. Put those two statistics together, and you have a collapse of 86 percent.
And that does not capture the whole of the problem. It understates it considerably. It passes by the 40 percent of American children born out of wedlock, with all the terrible pathologies that go along with fatherlessness. It passes by the 40 percent of marriages that end in divorce. It passes by the fact that in America, people are marrying later than ever before—the median age standing at about 29 years.
The sexual revolution really is the Lonely Revolution, whereby we live as if we were meant to be islands unto ourselves, especially during what should be the years of our greatest social energy and joy. “Rejoice with the wife of thy youth,” says Solomon; “let her be thy dearest hind, and most agreeable fawn; let her breasts inebriate thee at all times; be thou delighted continually with her love” (Prov. 5:18–19). Who can now understand those words? The way of life—rather a way of death—that our young people enter sexually prepares them for marriage by a series of disappointments, treacheries, sexual liaisons without love, cold dull lust, and sullen rejection of the opposite sex. It is to have the dead soul of someone who can no longer sing a love song without the snarl of irony.
A Fall Within the Fall
When St. Paul sums up his evaluation of fallen man, he describes a kind of fall within the Fall. First, men “changed the truth of God into a lie; and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Rom. 1:25). Then God delivered them over to their vain imaginations, and they ended up losing their hold upon nature besides, “for their women have changed the natural use into that which is against nature, and, in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the woman, have burned in their lusts toward one another” (1:26–27).
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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more on family from the online archives
31.5—September/October 2018
Errands into the Moral Wilderness
Forms of Christian Family Witness & Renewal by Allan C. Carlson
31.1—January/February 2018
The Wisdom of the Victorian Quest for Innocence by David Sandifer
33.3—May/June 2020
Maternal Body: A Theology of Incarnation from the Christian East by Carrie Frederick Frost
Fertile Ground: A Pilgrimage Through Pregnancy by Laura S. Jansson by Agnes R. Howard
more from the online archives
32.2—March/April 2019
on Preserving Physical & Spiritual Nourishment by Nathanael Devlin
32.6—November/December 2019
on Taking Heed of the Parallels Between the Crises of Yesterday & Today by Korey D. Maas
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