Marriage Dropping In Popularity Among Young Americans

The Pew Research Center released a report last week showing a record number of Americans have never married. Using 2012 census data, the Pew Center found that about 20 percent of people over age 25 had never been married, and the authors predict many of these will never tie the knot. This is double the share that were never married in 1960 and today, about a quarter of those ages 24 to 35 are cohabiting. Young adults also do not view marriage as particularly beneficial to society as a whole. 67 percent of those ages 18 to 29 agreed that “society is just as well off if people have priorities other than marriage and children.”

Interestingly, nearly 70 percent of those polled still believe it is important for couples who plan to spend their lives together to marry, and half of never married adults say they would like to marry someday. Essentially, this data confirms that our culture (particularly younger Americans) views marriage as important on a personal level, but not a societal level.

Marriage, of course, does matter at a societal level. Although many are not marrying, Americans are still having children. In 2012, over 40 percent of births were to unmarried women. Nearly a quarter of all births between 2006 and 2010 were to cohabiting couples, up from just 14 percent in 2002. Despite this surge in extramarital childbearing, social science still shows married-couple households are the ideal for children. Although single-parent families make up a third of all families with children, they constitute 71 percent of all poor families with children.

The Pew report focuses primarily on economic and social trends related to delaying marriage or avoiding it entirely, but it does not consider religion, which plays a key role in promoting marriage and the formation of stable families. Although this recent report does not break down the proportion of never married persons by religious affiliation, the 2008 Pew Religious Landscape Survey showed that in 2008, about one in five Americans had never been married. Nearly 30 percent of those calling themselves “unaffiliated” were never married, compared with approximately 15 percent of those identifying as Catholic and Protestant Christians.

Religion can even play a transformative role for women who have already had children outside of marriage. A 2007 study by W. Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas H. Wolfinger showed that “urban mothers who have a nonmarital birth are significantly more likely to marry within a year of that birth if they attend church [because] religious beliefs and social supports associated with church attendance may help urban mothers make the transition to marriage in communities where marriage has become increasingly infrequent.”

Traditional Christian teaching recognizes that marriage is not for everyone, but it is normative for sex and childbearing. Marriage has a public purpose, as each union is the formation of a new family unit, not merely a declaration of mutual love. It is not a panacea for society’s ills, but lived experience and research show marriage provides the best chance at a happy, stable life for children and it yields a variety of health and economic benefits for adults.

Unfortunately, unless trends shift dramatically Christians and other faith communities may soon be the only enclaves in America where married families are the norm.