The American family is failing. It isn’t difficult to understand why, though it may not be popular to discuss. The family, as the basic unit of society, is fundamentally rooted in or founded upon the institution of marriage. But this institution has become diluted and degraded over the years, yielding disastrous results.
Birth rates are crucial to a nation’s survival, of course, but they alone will not suffice if the family itself … collapses.
Social media influencer Ashley St. Clair recently announced that she and tech billionaire Elon Musk have a five-month-old child together, although the two are not married. Musk has over a dozen children with at least four different women. While it is commendable that Musk promotes raising birth rates and is frequently photographed carrying his children at Mar-a-Lago or the White House, the tech scion has not built a family. A family requires a mother and a father, a husband and a wife.
In 2024, only 47 percent of households in the U.S. were led by a married couple. While this is marginally higher than the all-time-low of 2022, when 46.8 percent of households were led by a married couple, it’s a far cry from the high of 1949, when nearly 79 percent of U.S. households were led by a married couple. Divorce rates, of course, are a factor, but divorce rates have reached a record 50-year-low.
The issue is that the marriage rate has also hit a 50-year-low. In 1970, just over 75 women per 1,000 unmarried women got married. That figure has been declining ever since, bottoming out at 28 marriages per 1,000 married women in 2021 and rising to just over 30 as of the end of 2022. In other words, fewer and fewer couples are getting married. This happens to coincide with a trend of sexlessness among young Americans.
Over the past decade, a growing number of American adults aged 22 to 34 are simply not having monogamous sex. According to the Institute for Family Studies, the case is “not that a small number of men are having sex with more and more women, but simply that men and women are failing to couple off together: the major decline is in sex between people who only had sex with one person in the prior year, i.e. approximately monogamous sex.”
The decline in marriages, the decline in married couples leading families, and even the decline in sex is symptomatic of a spiritual cancer eroding the very foundation of society: use. The great Dominican philosopher and theologian St. Thomas Aquinas once explained that the opposite of love is not hate, it is use. Where love is the complete giving of oneself to the beloved, a willing surrender of oneself, and a desire to achieve the good of the beloved, use is the inverse: using another person is a consuming, not a giving; it is not a willing surrender but, often, a forceful possession; and it does not consider the good of the other, only the appetites of the self.
The debilitatingly widespread and liberal approach to pornography, contraception, and abortion have all contributed to the development of this culture of use. Each of these evils enables and encourages the individual not only to mistake himself (and not the family) for the essential unit of society, but accelerates the degradation of relationship and, ultimately, isolates the individual in a hubristic state where he alone is god, and all others are not persons but are mere tools or instruments for his pleasure.
Marriage Cures Use
Marriage is the cure for the cancer of use — that is, marriage properly understood. Contrary to the reigning belief of the 21st century, marriage is not a mere social contract, it is not a simple legal agreement, it is a sacrament. The purpose of sacraments is to perfect virtue in the soul and, through the assistance of supernatural grace, make the individual holier.
Marriage does just this. Humility, selflessness, courage, temperance, perseverance, generosity of spirit, and self-sacrifice are all practiced and perfected in marriage, culminating in love. Through the sacrament of marriage, the mortal may indeed become immortal, modeling himself and his life upon the One whom C.S. Lewis so aptly named “Love Himself.” And, with the aid of Love Himself, the mortal may find his imitation attain perfection in the vaulted echelons of eternity.
Birth rates are crucial to a nation’s survival, of course, but they alone will not suffice if the family itself, founded upon the wellspring of marriage, collapses. Civilization would then tumble headlong into the abyss and from that decadent darkness there may be, perhaps, no return until the ending of the world. As goes the marriage, so goes the family. As goes the family, so goes the world.
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