Culture, Class and the Decline of Marriage - NYTimes.com

Continuing with my promised series of responses to Kevin Drum on gay marriage, here?s his demographic case that growing public support for same-sex wedlock can?t possibly have any connection to the wider retreat from marriage:

I don?t think the demographic details back up Douthat?s case. Take a look at the demographic groups where marriage has declined: very famously, it?s been among poor and working class women, and especially among poor and working class black women. I?ll concede that I might be off base here, but I think Douthat is assuming that recondite arguments over procreation and gay marriage, which are common in his highly-educated social group, are also common in the groups where marriage has declined. I doubt that very much. What?s more, support for gay marriage is lowest in precisely the groups that have abandoned traditional marriage in the largest numbers. If the procreation argument were really affecting marriage rates, you?d expect to see the biggest impact in the groups where this argument is most commonly advanced, and in the groups that most strongly support gay marriage. Instead we?ve seen the opposite.

It?s true that support for gay marriage has historically been strongest among the most educated Americans, who also tend to postpone childbearing till after wedlock in far greater numbers than do the poor and working class; likewise, it?s been historically strongest among whites and weaker among minorities, and whites tend to enjoy greater family stability as well. (Note that ?historically? ? I?ll return to this below.)?These points are excellent evidence against the apocalyptic proposition that mere support for gay marriage will ?destroy? heterosexual marriage, and plausible evidence for the argument that gay marriage either has no impact on people?s attitudes toward the institution, or (as some of its conservative supporters hope) actually serves to buttress marriage?s influence over people?s lives.

But there?s another story you can tell here, about how different models of marriage work out (or don?t) for different communities and socioeconomic groups. Liberal doubts about the past existence of a procreative grounding for marriage notwithstanding, there?s a general understanding that the combination of the sexual revolution, economic change, and shifting gender norms have altered the way Americans conceptualize marriage, what they expect out of the institution, and how it shapes their romantic and reproductive choices. There are different takes on how this change has worked and what it means, celebratory and critical and everywhere in between ??from Stephanie Coontz?s line about ?how love conquered marriage? to Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson?s description of a new??consumption partnership??model of wedlock to the George-Gergis-Anderson view of a ?revisionist? view of marriage displacing a ?conjugal? understanding. But I think a lot of people would recognize the phenomenon as the National Marriage Project describes it:

Over the last four decades, many Americans have moved away from identifying with an ?institutional? model of marriage, which seeks to integrate sex, parenthood, economic cooperation, and emotional intimacy in a permanent union. This model has been overwritten by the ?soul mate? model, which sees marriage as primarily a couple-centered vehicle for personal growth, emotional intimacy, and shared consumption that depends for its survival on the happiness of both spouses.?Thus where marriage used to serve as the gateway to responsible adulthood, it has come to be increasingly seen as a capstone of sorts that signals couples have arrived, both financially and emotionally?or are on the cusp of arriving.

As the passage suggests, this model didn?t just spring into being fully formed in 1968 or so: It developed gradually, through experiments and experience and also through cultural conflict with alternative models?? both a more institutional and procreation-oriented model, which remained (and still remains) influential, especially among more religious Americans, and the more purely libertine, entirely deinstitutionalized approach to sex and relationships that gave us so many wonderful trends in the 1970s. To the extent that the ?soul mate?/capstone model has steadily gained ground relative to the alternatives, it?s because it seems to offer a plausible, stabilizing balance between sexual freedom and sexual restraint, new gender roles and traditional forms, adult liberty and children?s needs, the secular and the spiritual. And it offers, as well, a model of marriage that can easily encompass gay and lesbian partnerships as well as male-female ones, which is why the idea of same-sex wedlock has passed so quickly from seeming absurd to seeming commonsensical.

But whereas the institutional model was associated with similar family structures for rich and poor alike, the soulmate/capstone model has thus far only really been stabilizing for the upper and upper middle classes.?For the most vulnerable Americans, poor African-Americans and then whites, the new model never had a chance to work: The ?70s-era combination of sudden sexual freedom and economic stagnation?? and if you accept the Charles Murray thesis, perverse welfare policies???more or less demolished traditional family structures in a generation, helping to create the underclass as we know it today. For Middle America, meanwhile, there has been a slower but unmistakable drift away from two-parent households and stable families, which has accelerated as the forces propping the older, institutional understanding?? traditional Christianity, in particular?? have seen their influence over American life diminish. Only among the college-educated has the new model brought anything like the kind of stability that Americans took for granted half a century ago ? mostly, one might submit, because the rewards for following a careful ?education, job, marriage, kids? trajectory are so obvious that college-educated American understand the marriage-procreation connection intuitively, as a kind of gnostic wisdom that doesn?t need to be spelled out.

In the rest of the country, though ? well, again, I think the National Marriage Project has it mostly right:

[Disconnecting] normative links among sex, parenthood, and marriage ? generally works well enough for highly educated Americans, who tend to focus first on education and work, then marriage, and then children, and who see early parenthood as an obstacle to their bourgeois success sequence ??But it does not work out so well for less-educated Americans, who greatly value children, do not have bright educational and professional prospects, and also do not believe their romantic relationships or marriages meet society?s new bar for a capstone marriage. Indeed, their love of children and the disconnect between their soul-mate ideals and their real-word experiences leave less-educated Americans much more likely to have children outside of marriage, to cohabit, or to divorce when their relationship or their financial situation fails to measure up to expectations.

But the fact that this model isn?t working out that well in non-college educated America hasn?t prevented the values associated with it from spreading apace, with each succeeding American generation?? Boomer, X, Millennial?? being more likely to embrace a more flexible view of marriage?s connection to procreation, and a less normative view of marriage generally. Those values have spread, in part, because of economic trends that have further weakened marriage: Shifting values, in this sense, are a consequence of instability as well as a cause. (If you grow up with fewer models of a successful 2-parent around you, you?re more likely to simply accept the separation of sex, marriage and family as the Way Things Have To Be.) But they have also spread because they?work out well for the people who set the tone for the culture, and who therefore don?t see why their values shouldn?t be preached and modeled and embodied ???in?sitcoms and movies, reality shows and glossy magazines, and everywhere that mass media works to shape attitudes and aspirations, whether about the proper way to spend your 20s or the kind of money that you need to spend to make your wedding a true capstone moment. (Liberals who scoff at the idea that pop culture has this kind of influence should read?Jonathan Chait?s excellent New York essay on Hollywood liberalism, for a start.)

Nor is it only mass media: Our politics sets a cultural tone as well, and the people (politicians, consultants, talking heads) who mostly decide what counts as A National Crisis, what counts as The Civil Rights Cause of Our Time, and what gets back-burnered as A Complicated Sociological Phenomenon In Need of Further Study are themselves all people for whom the post-sexual revolution landscape looks pretty darn stable, and whose interests naturally turn to other issues, other causes, other trends.

This is where the same-sex marriage debate enters in, I think. It?s because of the capstone/soul mate model of marriage, certainly, that gay marriage has found so much support so fast ??but it?s also that the case for gay marriage itself is a form of advocacy on behalf of that model, and (perhaps more importantly) against the traditional/institutional model?s tighter sex-marriage-procreation link. And not, pace Drum, in some ?recondite? way that ordinary people are unlikely to follow. The case for gay marriage, as advanced first in culture and then in politics, says 1) the cool people know that marriage is primarily about who you love, and only secondarily about how and when and whether you have kids, 2) the uncool people, political parties and religions that say otherwise are intolerant, bigoted, homophobic and dumb. This is a very effective, very comprehensible, not-at-all recondite argument?? that?s why it?s winning! But it doesn?t just depend on the newer model of marriage; it advances that model?s imaginative hold as well. It?s not just a political argument: It?s a public teaching about what marriage is and isn?t, which communities are praiseworthy and which are problematic, which ideas deserve a hearing and which deserve only scorn. And again, it requires a certain willed naivete not to see how it might influence people?s ideas about their own lives, about their own (potential) marriages, about the older model of marriage and the institutions and beliefs associated with it, and so on.

I think if you look at the Millennial generation, that?s (part of) what you see happening. Overall, the steady generational shift in attitudes toward marriage and family has gradually been swamping the differences between the social classes that pundits used to take for granted. If you browse this National Marriage Project report, for instance, you?ll see that in their attitudes toward sex and marriage and their likelihood of church attendance, moderately-educated Americans have been converging with well-educated Americans since the 1970s: It used to be that Middle America was clearly more traditionalist than upper and upper middle class America, more ?institutionalist? about marriage and more religious overall, but recently the moderately-educated have become more secular and socially liberal while upper middle class opinion has either remained the same or become slightly more socially conservative (in part, I suspect, because many evangelical Christians have moved from the lower middle to the upper middle class). Likewise on gay marriage specifically: Overall, age and religion divide Americans on same-sex marriage much more than class does, and for the rising generation the class division almost evaporates. (As does the gap between whites and Hispanics ? and African-Americans are catching up.)?The data isn?t online, but I contacted the Pew Research Center and they confirmed that the big gay marriage gaps that Drum is referencing, between the liberal upper middle class and everyone else, simply don?t exist for the Millennial generation: ?There is almost no difference,? they told me, ?in support for gay marriage between 18-29 yr olds with college degrees (71%) and those who haven?t graduated college (65%).?

So we have this convergence, which is mostly middle America drifting toward upper middle class norms and ideas about marriage, and drifting away from the (mostly religious) institutions that preach a stronger connection between sex, procreation and wedlock. And here?s what?s striking: As middle American ideas about marriage have converged with upper class ideas, their outcomes have converged with the destabilized lower class. Middle American divorce rates and out-of-wedlock birth rates tracked with the college-educated until the 1980s; they?ve been converging with high school dropouts ever since. A generation ago, it seemed at least plausible that 21st century America would have two (relatively) stable marriage cultures?? one upper middle class and more socially liberal, one lower middle class and more socially conservative. But in the current generation, the upper class?s values have triumphed, and the lower-middle marriage culture has gone into steeper decline.

This is why it makes the most sense, whether we?re talking about gay marriage in particular or changing ideas about marriage in general, to zero in on Millennial attitudes, because it?s the Millenials and late-born generation Xers whose marital and reproductive choices are actually driving trends right now. If, as social conservatives contend, the symbolic severing of marriage and procreation has the potential to shape attitudes and mores, then obviously you wouldn?t expect a big impact on already-married people long past their childbearing years. You?d expect any effect to show up, instead, among people setting out on their life course. And whether the gay marriage debate has had any actual impact or not, if you break things down generationally there really is a clear correlation between 1) support for same-sex unions, 2) a belief that marriage and parenthood are basically separable?(and that their growing separation might be a good thing) 3) a retreat from institutional religion and with it, a further retreat from the institutional understanding of wedlock 4) the likelihood of?substituting cohabitation for marriage?and having at least your first child out of wedlock.

Are these linked trends mostly about gay marriage? No, no, and no. (I think that same-sex marriage is a consequence that?s looped back and become a cause as well, but trends 2, 3 and 4 would obviously be with us with or without trend 1.) And do they have a major economic component that the foregoing has slighted? Yes, absolutely. (One obvious reason why middle American outcomes have been converging with more downscale Americans is that wages have stagnated in the 2000s and jobs have grown scarcer for people, and especially men, without a college degree.)

But the fact the economic trends are easier to white-paper and run regressions on doesn?t mean that the culture doesn?t matter, that ideas don?t matter: They do, they do, they do. And if we can?t do anything about these trends (the subject of my next post) or don?t want to do anything about them (because we think the gains in human welfare are worth it), it?s all the more important to be clear-eyed, as we prepare to take the next step in marriage?s transformation, about what this transformation has meant, and done, and cost.

Source: http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/04/culture-class-and-the-decline-of-marriage/

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