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The Facts of Life &
Marriage:
Social Science & the
Vindication of Christian
Moral Teaching
By W. Bradford Wilcox
In 1968, Pope Paul VI
released Humanae
Vitae, an encyclical
affirming the
Christian tradition’s
ancient and constant
moral teaching that
contraception is wrong.
Sadly, Humanae Vitae
came as a shock to many
Christians inside and
outside the Catholic
Church, who thought that
the church was ready to
accommodate herself to
the modern view of
marriage as primarily a
relational, not
procreative,
institution.
Indeed, in the wake of
Humanae Vitae, the
Catholic Church largely
lost her ability to
successfully convince
the American laity, not
to mention Christians
throughout the West, of
the truth and beauty of
her moral teaching on
matters related to sex
and marriage. Three
historical,
sociological, and
intellectual factors
help account for this
failure.
Three Failures
First, Humanae Vitae
came at the worst
possible moment in
history. The encyclical
arrived in the wake of
Vatican II, just after
the Catholic Church had
thrown open her windows
to the modern world.
Unfortunately, the
modern world was then
succumbing to the siren
song of the sexual
revolution, was awash in
a pervasive
anti-authoritarianism,
and inclined to a
hedonistic ethic fueled
by unprecedented
affluence. As the
Catholic biblical
scholar Luke Timothy
Johnson observed at a
forum sponsored by
Commonweal magazine,
“American Catholics
truly became American at
[precisely the] moment
when America itself was
undergoing a cultural
revolution.”
In the aftermath of John
F. Kennedy’s ascendancy
to the presidency, and
their own dramatic
increases in educational
and economic attainment,
Catholics in the United
States were coming into
their own as
independent-minded
Americans. With their
newfound status, they
were less inclined to
extend undue deference
to the opinions of the
Holy Father, and the
Catholic Church more
generally, especially on
matters that would
require them to
sacrifice their
cherished American
aspirations to upward
mobility and consumer
comfort—sacrifices often
associated with having a
large family. For all
these reasons, most
American Catholics in
the late 1960s and 1970s
rejected Humanae
Vitae.
Second, and just as
ominously, this
rejection led many of
these same Catholics to
call into question their
commitment to the whole
fabric of Catholic moral
teaching on sex-related
matters. If the Catholic
Church is wrong on birth
control, the thinking
went, she is probably
wrong on divorce and
remarriage, premarital
sex, and so on. As
Johnson, himself a
critic of Humanae
Vitae observed, “The
birth control issue
finally initiated many
American Catholics into
the hermeneutics of
suspicion,” a
hermeneutics that made
them skeptical of all
the church’s
pronouncements regarding
sexual morality.
Indeed, the controversy
surrounding Humanae
Vitae was, as Andrew
Greeley pointed out in
The Catholic Myth,
“the occasion for
massive apostasy and for
[a] notable decline in
religious devotion and
belief,” as many
Catholics concluded that
the Catholic Church had
fallen out of touch with
the modern world. This
controversy also hurt
the church’s ability to
speak to the larger
Christian community on
issues of sexual ethics
and family life, as she
was seen to be out of
touch with the realities
of modern marriage.
Third, the mistaken view
that the church is
hopelessly out of touch,
hopelessly inflexible,
and hopelessly bereft of
compassion on matters
related to sex and
marriage has been and
continues to be advanced
by Catholic
intellectuals with
substantial public
platforms. The
pronouncements of
Charles Curran, Andrew
Greeley, Richard McBrien,
and other like-minded
Catholic theologians and
social scientists have
only added to the
confusion, dissent, and
scandal that swirls
around Christian moral
teaching.
In various ways, and
with varying degrees of
clarity and honesty, the
dissenters argue that
the church must
accommodate her morality
to the ways of the world
if she hopes to speak in
an authentic way to the
experience and concerns
of modern men and women.
They also argue—and this
is important—that the
most compassionate route
forward for the church
is one that leads to
changes in her moral
teaching. Law must give
way to grace, rules must
give way to experience,
dogma must give way to
the Spirit, and the pope
must give way to the
people.
Accommodationist Error
In the heady decade of
the 1970s, when a
countercultural tide
swept over the Catholic
Church and the nation as
a whole, and the academy
was in thrall to the
counterculture, this
accommodationist agenda
seemed to have a certain
plausibility. No longer.
The first problem is
that the
accommodationist agenda
is based on bad social
science. When most of
these intellectuals were
in their prime, the best
social science suggested
that the ideal posture
of the church to “family
change,” as it was
euphemistically called,
was one of acceptance
and support. But
contemporary social
science on the
contentious issues of
our time—such as
contraception, divorce,
and
cohabitation—suggests
just the opposite
conclusion. The shifts
in sexual and familial
behavior to which these
dissenters would like
the church to
accommodate herself have
been revealed in study
after study to be social
catastrophes.
Let me be perfectly
clear: The leading
scholars who have
tackled these topics are
not Christians, and most
of them are not
political or social
conservatives. They are,
rather, honest social
scientists willing to
follow the data wherever
it may lead. And the
data has, as we shall
see, largely vindicated
Christian moral teaching
on sex and marriage. So
the intellectual
foundation for dissent
on moral matters is
collapsing.
The second problem with
the dissenting agenda is
that its moral laxity
has been most disastrous
for the most vulnerable
members of our society:
the poor. The poor have
paid and continue to pay
the highest price for
the cultural revolution
that Curran, Greeley,
McBrien, and others
would like the church to
baptize.
Let me now offer a
summary of the social
scientific research on
contraception and
divorce that illuminates
the problems with the
accommodationist agenda.
Broken Connection
In Humanae Vitae,
Pope Paul VI warned that
the widespread use of
contraception would lead
to “conjugal infidelity
and the general lowering
of morality”; he also
warned that man would
lose respect for woman
and “no longer [care]
for her physical and
psychological
equilibrium”; rather,
man would treat woman as
a “mere instrument of
selfish enjoyment, and
no longer as his
respected and beloved
companion.” Why? By
breaking the natural and
divinely ordained
connection between sex
and procreation, women
and especially men would
focus on the hedonistic
possibilities of sex and
cease to see sex as
something that was
intrinsically linked to
new life and to the
sacrament of marriage.
In the United States,
Humanae Vitae was
the object of
unprecedented dissent.
Let me summarize the
argument of one
dissenter on this
subject, Andrew Greeley,
a priest, Jesuit, and
professor of sociology
at the University of
Chicago. First, Greeley
argued that Catholic
teaching on
contraception does not
appreciate that married
Catholics rely on sex
for bonding, and they
should not have to worry
about bringing a baby
into their lives when
they bond.
Second, he claimed that
the hierarchy is more
concerned about keeping
its power, by blindly
following church
tradition on
contraception, than with
helping ordinary people.
“The problem is the
arrogance of power that
makes many church
leaders insensitive to
the problems of ordinary
people and heedless of
their needs—and of the
Holy Spirit speaking
through their
experiences,” he
declared in The
Catholic Myth. He
even went so far as to
suggest that “[messing]
around with the intimate
lives of men and women
to protect your own
power is demonic.”
There we have it. The
popes’ and bishops’
efforts to uphold the
Christian tradition’s
consensus against
artificial
contraception—stretching
from the Didache
in the first century,
through such documents
as Calvin’s
Commentary on Genesis
in the sixteenth
century, to at least the
Anglican bishops’
notorious decision in
1930—is legalistic,
unrealistic, and
demonic.
But on this topic, as on
others, Greeley does not
reconcile his polling
data with what he knows
the sociological data
says about the
consequences of
widespread contraception
in the United States.
What does this data tell
us? Well, scholars from
Robert Michael at
Greeley’s own University
of Chicago to George
Akerlof at the
University of California
at Berkeley argue that
contraception played a
central role in
launching the sexual and
divorce revolutions of
the late twentieth
century.
Contraceptive Losers
Michael has argued that
about half of the
increase in divorce from
1965 to 1976 can be
attributed to the
“unexpected nature of
the contraceptive
revolution”—especially
in the way that it made
marriages less
child-centered. [1]
Akerlof argues that the
availability first of
contraception and then
of abortion in the 1960s
and 1970s was one of the
crucial factors fueling
the sexual revolution
and the collapse of
marriage among the
working class and the
poor.
I will focus on
Akerlof’s scholarship.
George Akerlof is a
Nobel prize-winning
economist, a professor
at Berkeley, and a
former fellow at the
Brookings Institution;
he is not a
conservative. In two
articles in leading
economic journals,
Akerlof details findings
and advances arguments
that vindicate Paul VI’s
prophetic warnings about
the social consequences
of contraception for
morality and men. [2]
In his first article,
published in the
Quarterly Journal of
Economics in 1996,
Akerlof began by asking
why the United States
witnessed such a
dramatic increase in
illegitimacy from 1965
to 1990—from 24 percent
to 64 percent among
African-Americans, and
from 3 percent to 18
percent among whites. He
noted that public health
advocates had predicted
that the widespread
availability of
contraception and
abortion would reduce
illegitimacy, not
increase it. So what
happened?
Using the language of
economics, Akerlof
pointed out that
“technological
innovation creates both
winners and losers.” In
this case the
introduction of
widespread effective
contraception—especially
the pill—put traditional
women with an interest
in marriage and children
at “competitive
disadvantage” in the
relationship “market”
compared to modern women
who took a more
hedonistic approach to
sex and relationships.
The contraceptive
revolution also reduced
the costs of sex for
women and men, insofar
as the threat of
childbearing was taken
off the table,
especially as abortion
became widely available
in the 1970s.
The consequence?
Traditional women could
no longer hold the
threat of pregnancy over
their male partners,
either to avoid sex or
to elicit a promise of
marriage in the event
their partner made them
pregnant. And modern
women no longer worried
about getting pregnant.
Accordingly, more and
more women (traditional
as well as modern) gave
in to their boyfriends’
entreaties for sex.
In Akerlof’s words, “the
norm of premarital
sexual abstinence all
but vanished in the wake
of the technology
shock.” Women felt free
or obligated to
have sex before
marriage. For instance,
Akerlof finds that the
percentage of girls 16
and under reporting
sexual activity surged
in 1970 and 1971 as
contraception and
abortion became common
in many states
throughout the country.
Immiserating Sex
Thus, the sexual
revolution left
traditional or moderate
women who wanted to
avoid premarital sex or
contraception
“immiserated” because
they could not compete
with women who had no
serious objection to
premarital sex, and they
could no longer elicit a
promise of marriage from
boyfriends in the event
they got pregnant.
Boyfriends, of course,
could say that pregnancy
was their girlfriends’
choice. So men were less
likely to agree to a
shotgun marriage in the
event of a pregnancy
than they would have
been before the arrival
of the pill and
abortion.
Thus, many traditional
women ended up having
sex and having children
out of wedlock, while
many of the permissive
women ended up having
sex and contracepting or
aborting so as to avoid
childbearing. This
explains in large part
why the contraceptive
revolution was
associated with an
increase in both
abortion and
illegitimacy.
In his second article,
published in The
Economic Journal in
1998, Akerlof argues
that another key
outworking of the
contraceptive revolution
was the disappearance of
marriage—shotgun and
otherwise—for men.
Contraception and
abortion allowed men to
put off marriage, even
in cases where they had
fathered a child.
Consequently, the
fraction of young men
who were married in the
United States dropped
precipitously. Between
1968 and 1993 the
percentage of men 25 to
34 who were married with
children fell from 66
percent to 40 percent.
Accordingly, young men
did not benefit from the
domesticating influence
of wives and children.
Instead, they could
continue to hang out
with their young male
friends, and were thus
more vulnerable to the
drinking, partying,
tomcatting, and worse
that is associated with
unsupervised groups of
young men. Absent the
domesticating influence
of marriage and
children, young
men—especially men from
working-class and poor
families—were more
likely to respond to the
lure of the street.
Akerlof noted, for
instance, that substance
abuse and incarceration
more than doubled from
1968 to 1998. Moreover,
his statistical models
indicate that the growth
in single men in this
period was indeed linked
to higher rates of
substance abuse, arrests
for violent crimes, and
drinking.
From this research,
Akerlof concluded by
arguing that the
contraceptive revolution
played a key, albeit
indirect, role in the
dramatic increase in
social pathology and
poverty this country
witnessed in the 1970s;
it did so by fostering
sexual license,
poisoning the relations
between men and women,
and weakening the
marital vow. In
Akerlof’s words:
Just at the time, about
1970, that the permanent
cure to poverty seemed
to be on the horizon and
just at the time that
women had obtained the
tools to control the
number and the timing of
their children, single
motherhood and the
feminization of poverty
began their long and
steady rise.
Furthermore, the decline
in marriage caused in
part by the
contraceptive revolution
“intensified . . . the
crime shock and the
substance abuse shock”
that marked the 1970s
and 1980s.
Falling on the Poor
One pair of statistical
trends illustrates the
way in which the social
pathologies of the late
twentieth century fell
disproportionately on
the poor. About 5
percent of
college-educated women
now have a child outside
marriage (little change
since the 1960s), but
about 20 percent of
women with a high-school
education or less now
have a child outside
marriage (up from 7
percent in the 1960s).
Why were family decline
and attendant social
pathologies concentrated
among poor and working
class Americans? Think
of marriage as dependent
upon two pillars:
socioeconomic status and
normative commitment.
The poor have less of an
economic stake in
marriage, so they are
more dependent on
religious and moral
norms regarding
marriage. Middle-class
and upper-class
Americans remain
committed to marriage in
practice because they
continue to have an
economic and social
stake in marriage. They
recognize that their
lifestyle, and the
lifestyle of their
children, will be
markedly better if they
combine their economic
and social resources
with one spouse.
So the bottom line is
this: The research of
Nobel-prize-winning
economist George Akerlof
suggests that the tragic
outworkings of the
contraceptive revolution
were sexual license,
family dissolution,
crime, and poisoned
relations between the
sexes—and that the poor
have paid the heaviest
price for this
revolution. This
research suggests that
the Catholic Church’s
firm commitment to the
moral law in the face of
dramatic and widespread
dissent from within and
without is being
vindicated in precincts
that are not normally
seen as sympathetic to
Catholic teaching.
This research also
suggests that the
dissenting agenda
advanced by people like
Andrew Greeley amounts
to a false compassion.
Greeley is right to
claim that the Holy
Spirit speaks through
people’s experiences;
but a sober look at our
experience with
contraception reveals
that the Catholic
Church’s magisterium,
and the Christian
tradition it conveys,
best advances the
earthly happiness of
men, women, and
children, not
contraception.
Disordering Divorce
We have considered one
of traditional
Christianity’s most
controversial moral
teachings. I now turn to
the issue of divorce and
remarriage, where once
again the church offers
a sign of contradiction
to the modern world. The
Catechism of the
Catholic Church
aptly summarizes the
church’s teaching on
divorce and remarriage:
Divorce is a grave
offense against the
natural law. Divorce is
immoral . . . because it
introduces disorder into
the family and into
society. This disorder
brings grave harm to the
deserted spouse, to
children traumatized by
the separation of their
parents and often torn
between them, and
because of its
contagious effect, which
makes it truly a plague
on society.
The Catechism is
making two central
points: (1) divorce
harms children, and (2)
divorce is an infectious
social plague that hurts
the commonweal. For
these reasons, among
others, the church
condemns divorce and
prohibits remarriage.
The church’s seemingly
inflexible position on
divorce also comes in
for serious criticism
from the dissenters.
Notre Dame theology
professor Richard
McBrien, for instance,
argues that the church’s
position makes no
allowance for
individuals whose
marriage falls apart
“despite the best
efforts of all
concerned.” He further
argues that this pope
does not encourage “the
way of compassion” in
dealing with Catholics
who have divorced and
remarried, and does not
acknowledge the
“traditional Roman
principle that laws are
ideals to strive for and
not standards one can
realistically expect to
achieve on a day-to-day
basis.”
So McBrien’s argument,
which echoes the
arguments of mainline
Protestants in the early
twentieth century, boils
down to this: The church
should dispense with the
moral law in an effort
to be more compassionate
to people in difficult
situations. But what we
have, once again, is
false compassion.
This becomes clear when
we take a careful look,
once again, at the data.
Numerous scholars—from
Leora Friedberg at the
University of Virginia
to Nicholas Wolfinger at
the University of
Utah—have shown that
divorce does in fact
function as a social
plague. Friedberg showed
that passage of no-fault
divorce laws in the
1970s accelerated the
pace of divorce by about
17 percent between 1968
and 1988. [3] Wolfinger
showed that a parental
divorce increases the
children’s chance of
later being divorced
themselves by more than
50 percent, and is by
far one of the most
potent predictors of
divorce.
We can see that Pope
John Paul II is right
when he says that
divorce “has devastating
consequences that spread
in society like the
plague.” And we can see
that McBrien’s attempt
to help people in
difficult situations
greatly increases the
chance that their
children will wind up in
the same difficult
situations, which in
turn greatly increases
their children’s
chances, and so on.
But I would like to
focus on the other
aspect of the church’s
teaching, namely, that
divorce brings grave
harm to children. I am
going to focus on the
research of Sara
McLanahan, a professor
of sociology at
Princeton (and one of my
advisors for my doctoral
work there). Like
Akerlof, McLanahan is no
conservative. In the
1970s, as a divorced,
single mother, she set
out to show that the
negative effects of
divorce on children
could be attributed
solely to the economic
dislocation it caused.
But after spending 20
years researching the
subject, she came to the
conclusion that the
social and emotional
consequences of divorce
also played a key role
in explaining the
negative outcomes of
divorce. She also found
that remarriage was, on
average, no help to
children affected by
divorce.
Children’s Benefits
In Growing Up with a
Single Parent,
written with her
colleague Gary Sandefur
of the University of
Wisconsin, McLanahan
argued that the intact,
two-parent family does
four key things for
children. [4] First,
children benefit from
the economic resources
that mothers and
particularly fathers
bring to the household
through work and
sometimes family money.
Second, children see
their parents model
appropriate male-female
relations, including
virtues like fidelity
and self-sacrifice in
the context of a marital
relationship.
Third, because both
parents are invested in
the child, they spell
one another in caring
for their children, and
they monitor one
another’s parenting.
This reduces stress,
helps to insure that
parents are not too
strict or too
permissive, and makes
the intact family much
more likely than other
family arrangements to
forestall abuse.
Finally, fathers often
serve as key guides to
children seeking to
negotiate the outside
world as adolescents and
young adults. Fathers
introduce them to civic
institutions and the
world of work, and
provide them with key
contacts in these
worlds.
McLanahan also argued
that stepfathers do not
have the history, the
authority, and the trust
of the children to
function—on average—as
well as biological
fathers.
From the child’s point
of view, having a new
adult move into the
household creates
another disruption.
Having adjusted to the
father’s moving out, the
child must now
experience a second
reorganization of
household personnel.
Stepfathers are less
likely to be committed
to the child’s welfare
than biological fathers,
and they are less likely
to serve as a check on
the mother’s behavior.
So what effects did she
find? Children from
divorced families are
more likely to drop out
of high school: Data
from the National Survey
of Families and
Households showed that
children in divorced
families had a 17
percent risk of dropping
out of school, compared
to a 9 percent risk for
children in married
families, even after
controlling for parents’
education and race.
Other surveys found
similar results.
Girls raised in divorced
families are more likely
to have a nonmarital
birth while in their
teens: The National
Survey of Families and
Households showed this
risk to be 15 percent
for girls with divorced
parents, compared to 9
percent for those with
married parents. Again
this survey is typical.
McLanahan also found
that boys raised outside
of an intact nuclear
family are more than
twice as likely as other
boys to end up in
prison, even controlling
for a range of social
and economic factors.
[5]
McLanahan also explored
whether children in
stepfamilies did better
than children in
single-mother families.
Bear in mind that by the
time she was conducting
this latest round of
research, she had
remarried. Here is what
she found: “Remarriage
neither reduces nor
improves a child’s
chances of graduating
from high school or
avoiding a teenage
birth.” In other words,
remarriage does not
mitigate the devastating
social effects of
divorce.
More Falls on the Poor
The final point I would
like to make about the
divorce revolution is
that it has fallen, once
again,
disproportionately on
the shoulders of the
most vulnerable members
of our society. My own
research with the
National Survey of
Families and Households
indicates that married
couples with a
high-school diploma or
less education have a 19
percent higher risk of
divorce than married
couples with a college
degree. Other studies
show that poor and
working-class married
couples are much more
likely to divorce than
are middle- and
upper-class married
couples.
So, after spending 20
years researching the
effects of family
structure on children,
McLanahan came to this
conclusion in Growing
Up with a Single Parent:
If we were asked to
design a system for
making sure that
children’s basic needs
were met, we would
probably come up with
something quite similar
to the two-parent ideal.
Such a design, in
theory, would not only
ensure that children had
access to the time and
money of two adults, it
also would provide a
system of checks and
balances that promoted
quality parenting. The
fact that both parents
have a biological
connection to the child
would increase the
likelihood that the
parents would identify
with the child and be
willing to sacrifice for
that child, and it would
reduce the likelihood
that either parent would
abuse the child.
This, of course, sounds
quite similar to the
perennial wisdom of the
Christian moral
tradition, articulated
by figures as various as
John Paul II, Calvin,
and St. Thomas Aquinas.
Hopeful Notes
The portrait I have
painted is sobering. But
I would like to conclude
on two hopeful notes. We
are beginning to see a
new openness among
intellectuals to the
importance of marriage
and to the perils of
divorce. For a long
time, intellectuals were
not willing to
acknowledge the
importance of marriage
for children. But the
intellectual tide is now
turning towards a
refreshing willingness
to grapple with our
children’s toughest
social problems in a
probing and open-minded
manner.
Besides Akerlof and
McLanahan, scholars like
Linda Waite at the
University of Chicago,
Robert Lerman at the
Urban Institute, Isabel
Sawhill at the Brookings
Institution, and Norval
Glenn at the University
of Texas have all
underlined the
importance of marriage
in recent years. Their
willingness to speak up
on behalf of the
unvarnished truth—the
truth written on our
hearts, and the truth
evident for all to see
in our statistical
models—suggests that the
intellectual foundations
of dissent are crumbling
before our very eyes.
Second, there is a new
openness among
Evangelical Protestant
scholars and leaders to
the truth and wisdom of
the ancient Christian
teaching against
contraception. Among
others, Albert Mohler,
president of the
Southern Baptist
Seminary, Reformed
Theological Seminary
professor Harold O. J.
Brown, and Evangelical
theologian J. I. Packer
have raised serious
concerns about the moral
permissibility and
social consequences of
contraception. For
instance, in a recent
symposium on
contraception in
First Things, Mohler
wrote:
Thirty years of sad
experience demonstrate
that Humanae Vitae
[correctly] sounded
the alarm, warning of a
contraceptive mentality
that would set loose
immeasurable evil as
modern birth control
methods allowed
seemingly risk-free sex
outside the integrity of
the marital bond. At the
same time, it allowed
married couples to
completely sever the sex
act from procreation,
and God’s design for the
marital bond. . . .
Standing against the
spirit of the age,
evangelicals and Roman
Catholics must affirm
that children are God’s
good gifts and blessings
to the marital bond.
Further, we must affirm
that marriage falls
short of God’s design
when husband and wife
are not open to the gift
and stewardship of
children.
This intellectual
opening, itself a
product of Evangelical
Protestants’ growing
appreciation of the ways
in which the
contraceptive mentality
is connected to dramatic
increases in sexual
promiscuity, divorce,
and abortion, represents
an important opportunity
for orthodox Protestants
and Catholics to work
together in recovering
and rehabilitating
Christian moral teaching
about sex and the
family.
Faithful Christian
scholars need to seize
this moment, and
underline the
intellectual power and
coherence of Christian
moral teaching to
Christian colleges and
universities,
congregations, pastors,
and the public square.
Above all else, we need
to drive home the point
that social justice
cannot be divorced from
Christian moral
teaching. More than
anyone else, the poor
have been devastated by
the outworkings of the
sexual revolution of the
last forty years.
We must make it crystal
clear that the church’s
commitment to the poor
requires nothing less
than a vigorous
proclamation of the
church’s true and
beautiful teaching about
sex and marriage. In
other words, we must
make it clear that the
preferential option for
the poor begins in the
home.
ENDNOTES:
[1] Talk given at an
Emory University family
conference in March
2003.
[2] George Akerlof,
Janet L. Yellen, and
Michael L. Katz, “An
Analysis of
Out-of-Wedlock
Childbearing in the
United States,” The
Quarterly Journal of
Economics CXI
(1996); George Akerlof,
“Men Without Children,”
The Economic Journal
108 (1998).
[3] See Linda Waite and
Maggie Gallagher,
The Case for Marriage
(Broadway Books), p.
179; Margaret F. Brinig
and F. H. Buckley,
“No-Fault Laws and
At-Fault People,”
International Review of
Law and Economics 18
(1998), pp. 325–340.
[4] Harvard University
Press, 1994.
[5] Cynthia C. Harper
and Sara S. McLanahan,
“Father Absence and
Youth Incarceration,”
delivered at the annual
meeting of the American
Sociological Association
in 1998.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
W. Bradford Wilcox
is an assistant
professor of sociology
at the University of
Virginia and the author
of Soft Patriarchs, New
Men: How Christianity
Shapes Fathers and
Husbands (University
of Chicago Press, 2004).
“The Facts of Life &
Marriage” is based on a
paper he delivered to
the 2004 meeting of the
Fellowship of Catholic
Scholars [www.catholicscholars.org]
Prof. Wilcox is also a
fellow at the Institute
for Family Values.
Please visit their blog,
Family Scholars Blog, at
www.familyscholars.org
This article was
reprinted with
permission from the
Jan/Feb 2005 issue of
Touchstone Magazine.
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