If marriage is natural, why is defending it so hard? Taking up the challenge to marriage in the pews and the public square.

• Author: Gallagher, Maggie
• Position: Special Issue: The Nature of Marriage and Its Various Aspects

INTRODUCTION

Alfonso Cardinal Lopez Trujillo presents a rich and deep vision of marriage as "a natural institution which precedes the sacrament." (1) The essence of marriage, so understood, is unity and indissolubility. Marriage does not ratify or celebrate a preexisting relationship. It transforms the relation between man and woman because it comes into existence only from the moment a man and woman decide, via a free act of the will, to give themselves to each other in this unique way. (2)

Unity implies a community in the whole of life, including the gift and acceptance of the whole sexual self, and therefore an openness to giving and accepting from one another the gift of motherhood and fatherhood. (3) A woman who gives herself to a man at the altar as a wife, but secretly reserves the right to have sex or children with another man, is not really giving herself at all. A ceremony in which a man promises to stay with a woman until someone better comes along is not really making a marriage promise at all, whatever his legal certificate says.

The task is to explain the obstacles to achieving this vision of marriage and also the ways to overcome such obstacles. Practically speaking, the strongest resistance to this vision of marriage as a natural institution clusters around three areas: contraception, divorce, and gender. (4) What is the deep source of these obstacles to marriage? There are many possible answers, many of which Cardinal Trujillo touches upon: legal positivism, individualism, false anthropologies, self-created spiritualities, and the accompanying decline in religious and/or moral authority. (5) Most intriguing is that Cardinal Trujillo identifies ideology itself as the enemy of the family:

[T]he various historical attempts to eliminate the family as a natural institution have perhaps contributed to the decline, apparent now more than ever before, of the proper understanding of the "natural character" of the family. Such attempts have been produced particularly in countries following a Marxist ideology, in a world pursued by various totalitarianisms, and by the post-modern version of secularization, as well as the enormous transformations that the family has suffered in the West. Under Communism or Nazism, the rise of an antifamily ideology is readily understandable as one of many grotesque distortions of humanity made possible by a tiny minority's will to power. The family, as the generator of human and religious values, stands in the way of the totalitarian state's project to create a new man. As such, the natural family must be targeted and broken.

But today there is a new puzzle: how to explain the ongoing, rising antifamily ideologies in democratic societies, where power is both more broadly distributed and more responsive to ordinary people's wishes.

If the Catholic Church's teachings are based on natural law, available to rational people of good will, how is it that the Church finds it so difficult to defend its vision of marriage, not only in the public square, but even to church-going Catholics in free, democratic, developed nations? If marriage is natural, as the Catholic Church has always taught, why is it becoming so hard to defend marriage both in the pews and in the public square?

Take this question seriously. Something fundamental has changed in the social ecology of the family in all developed nations. This fundamental change makes the defense of the natural family both more urgently necessary and also far more challenging. The marriage crisis is not, or is not only, a crisis in moral values or philosophical ideas; it is an institutional crisis, arising from the way that modernity really does change relations between adults and children, as well as between husbands and wives, in novel ways that make not only sustaining the family much more difficult, but perceiving the need to do so as well.

1. IS MARRIAGE NECESSARY?

   The first thing to notice is how recently, and how swiftly, propositions that were once obvious to most reasonable people are now generally perceived as almost impossible to believe, except by faith alone.

   Take contraception, for example. Most who work in the area of marriage are aware of how challenging it is to make the case that contraception is morally wrong, not only in the public square but to the majority of Catholics. (7) What is less often recognized is how radically new this situation is. For centuries, the idea that marital contraception is morally wrong was almost universally accepted among Christian societies and had obvious, intuitive moral appeal outside of religious groups as well. (8) In 1930, the Lambeth Conference made the Episcopal Church the first major Christian denomination to accept birth control for married couples. (9) Within forty years, a thousand-year-old consensus had shattered. What was once more or less obvious to educated people became, to most Americans and Europeans, an obscure and apparently indefensible position, obviously grounded in blind faith, not reason. (10) Contraception moved out of the category of clear moral wrongs, like murder, and moved more into the category of obscure theological reasoning.

   One must pause a moment and digest the significance of this shift. What was once obvious to ordinary human reason has become all but impossible to believe, except through intense faith. This indicates that something very profound has shifted in the underlying ecology in which a formerly obvious moral insight is, or was, embedded.

2. WHAT HAS CHANGED?

   For most of human history, marriage and kin were obvious, urgent, personal necessities. People lived on farms or ran small family businesses. The family provided most of the goods that members lived on. Butter was made from cows that the family had milked, and these cows were fed by grain that the family had grown. The farm family produced its own clothes; cloth from flax the family had grown or lambs the family had sheared together was spun by wives, daughters, and mothers, and then cut and sewn. Providing the basics was extremely difficult, and such self-sufficiency required that the family cooperate together industriously. The family also provided almost all social insurance against disaster. (11) If a family member became sick, disabled, or grew old, the family would nurse and feed the stricken family member.

   In such circumstances, it is very clear that family loyalty, including marital loyalty, was a paramount virtue. Socially, it was obvious that the task of getting young people to join in marriage and make the next generation of kin was not just a private, personal taste, but an urgent necessity for the family and community.

   Think of Fiddler on the Roof. (12) In small tribal communities, it is perfectly obvious to everyone that if the butcher does not get himself a wife, then a few years down the road, the village will not have a butcher anymore. For most of human history, procreation was much, much harder than it is today--from the physical toll, risks to the mother, and high rates of infant mortality, to the economic burden of caring for dependents, which posed a far greater threat to survival than today. (13) And yet, for most of human history, making kin was an obvious necessity, both for the individual and the community. Marriage is the lynchpin of this system of kin; the tie that binds biological strangers and their joint children into a single family unit and the place where kin are made. When the need for kin-making is obvious and pressing, the need for a socially-supported sexual code holding families together is also obvious and pressing. Adherence to moral codes is always strongest when it is intuitively obvious to people that they do well by doing good.

   Today, government and the market have taken over the family's once-undisputed roles as the prime source of key goods, i.e., wealth production and social insurance. If sick, one goes to the hospital and wants professional doctors and nurses to provide care. Social Security, pensions, and/or savings support the elderly, as opposed to their children's wages or farming capacity. When clothes are needed, they are purchased at Wal-Mart or Nordstrom. The market not only grows the cows; it slaughters, packages, and cooks them, and then serves them up at McDonald's.

   Why has the family lost so many of these functions? It is important to note that the key reason the family has lost so many practical functions is that the government and the market do them much, much more efficiently. The genius of market capitalism is that it allows biological strangers to pool their economic energies in ways that unleash a flood of human creativity, ingenuity, and productivity. (14) People prefer to have an independent source of income, such as government Social Security, than to become dependent on their children in old age. Hospitals really are better at caring for the urgently ill than sisters, aunts, or mothers at home. The market and government bureaucracies are both forms of systematizing, rationalizing institutions that produce and distribute wealth better--more abundantly and more fairly, with fewer felt emotional burdens--than the old kinship system did.

   Of course, rationalizing systems like these are also lonelier than the older, personal ones. The pervasive facelessness of government and market relations also heightens the emotional importance of family relations, which leads perversely to a greater willingness to jump ship when emotional needs are not being met. If the function of the family is to meet personal needs for belonging, identity, and intimacy, why stick around if these needs are not being met?

   Today, the family's importance to the larger society, as well as to the individual, has radically changed. The family is still a wealth-creating institution, (15) but it is far less important than market relations in producing needed and wanted goods. The family still provides important social insurance goods--care for...