Marriage as a Social Justice IssueMarriage as a Social Justice Issue
MARRIAGE IS A SOCIAL JUSTICE ISSUE. INDEED, IT IS CENTRAL to the possibility of a just society. Historically and universally our most child-centered institution, marriage and the marriage-based family, reduce the risk of poverty, crime, mental and physical illness, poor educational outcomes, domestic or intimate-partner violence, and so on. The marriage gap between the more educated and affluent on one hand, and the poor and middle class, both black and white, on the other, is widening. That is both a reflection and a source of increasing inequality.1 Paul R. Amato’s 2005 study shows the profound impact on children of changes in family structure since 1970, when the sexual revolution took off.2 The consequences associated with these changes include the explosion of divorce, an increase in nonmarital births, and rises in cohabitation and fatherless and blended families. The revolution’s defining feature was the destigmatization and increased incidence of almost all kinds of sex inside and especially outside of marriage. If U.S. family structures were as strong today as they were in 1970, he calculates:
643,000 fewer children each year would fail a grade at school
1,040,000 fewer children each year would be suspended from school
531,000 fewer children each year would need psychotherapy
453,000 fewer children each year would be involved in violence
515,000 fewer children each year would be cigarette smokers
179,000 fewer children would consider suicide
71,000 fewer children each year would attempt suicide.
Children’s experience of repeated family-structure change has a robust association with compromised development across the early life course. In a recent study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, Paula Fomby and Stacey Bosick investigate the relation between family-structure instability during childhood and adolescence and children’s transition to adulthood, up to age 24.3 Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N = 8,841), the researchers find evidence of associations between early and later family instability and low rates of college completion, early union formation and childbearing, and early entry into the labor force. The researchers find that these associations are explained by family structure, delinquency, and academic performance in adolescence.
Another study conducted by Michael Gähler and Anna Garriga, using longitudinal data from two waves (1968 and 2000) of the Swedish Level of Living Survey, finds that as alternative family forms have become more prevalent and accepted, the negative impact of parental divorce on children has not faded.4 The evidence from Sweden suggests that the link between parental divorce in childhood and psychological distress in young adulthood remains as robust now as it was forty years ago. This link is strong, in spite of government policy to offset the negative effects of parental divorce on children and the social acceptance of divorce.
The considerable benefits of marriage, attested to now by decades of social-science research and recognized by scientists across the political spectrum, cannot be reduced to a selection effect. That is, it is not simply that healthier or more affluent people are more likely to get married in the first place, regardless of any independent effect of marriage itself. Of course marriage does involve this kind of selection. That’s part of its purpose and function—as personified in the young woman’s father who questions the young man about his prospects. But we know from longitudinal studies that follow subjects as they enter, leave, and reenter marriages, that marriage has benefits from the start that other kinds of relationship status lack. These benefits that distinguish marriage from other kinds of relationships begin even before the wedding, with the increase in earnings and decline in risk-taking behavior of young men when they get engaged.5 The benefits for women and men and their children—in income, health, mental health, and so on—are lost with divorce and regained with remarriage (the more so the shorter the gap between marriages).6
So, given that marriage is a key protective factor, and as such of key importance for the lives of young people, what do we teach them? In particular, what do we teach students of social work and related fields, those who seek to help those negatively affected by marriage’s decline? The Institute for American Values published a report under the direction of the late sociologist of the family, Norval Glenn, entitled “Closed Hearts, Closed Minds: The Textbook Story of Marriage.”7 Glenn analyzes twenty textbooks used in some 8,000 courses across the country to teach hundreds of thousands of young people. He explains: “The college instructors who are training the next generation of counselors, nurses, therapists, social workers, and teachers often rely on precisely these books for their own understanding of the scientific consensus on family matters.” 8 But the books are riddled with errors. They show little interest in the effects of marital disruption or single parenting on children, devoting an average of only 3.5 pages to this topic. Three times as much space is devoted to adult relations, without regard to how they affect children. Current textbooks convey a pessimistic view of marriage. These books repeatedly suggest that marriage is more a problem than a solution. The potential costs of marriage to adults receive exaggerated treatment, while the benefits of marriage, both to individuals and society, are downplayed.
Mary Eberstadt, in Adam and Eve after the Pill, describes the widespread “will to disbelieve” the empirical evidence on the negative impact of the sexual revolution.9 There is a similar reluctance to admit the benefits of marriage and monogamy for children and adults, including those in disadvantaged families. The blindness to evidence she describes perpetuated in classrooms and textbooks across the country a view of marriage that had long been disproved by research. A big gap opened up between research and researchers on one hand and textbooks and teachers on the other. It was the latter that shaped the ideology in which social workers and other helping professionals were trained for decades.
Among those living in poor communities, it is not the case that they no longer aspire to marriage. They do, but it has ceased to be the path to “settling down,” devoting oneself to another and to the children who result from the union of husband and wife. Instead, marriage has become for them, not a path to achievement of such stability, but a reward. Marriage is viewed as a dream and a luxury. Children are seen as more important—and more attainable—than marriage and so precede it, even though the children themselves suffer from the instability and complexity of the new system. Given the disappearance of the “shotgun marriage”—marriage as an obligation and expectation for men who father children outside it—and the ubiquity of cohabitation, divorce, and single parenthood in poor communities, marriage is no longer the institution that structures and stabilizes relations between the sexes. Instead, it has become a practically unattainable ideal.10
For social workers, who deal with populations where marriage has largely fallen apart, the tendency rightly has been to focus on helping those who suffer most from the collapse. These include abandoned mothers and their children, “blended” families, single parents, children in chaotic homes living without emotional or economic security, and so on. But, as with welfare policy, this approach raises a dilemma. Do the policy interventions supported by social workers help promote marriage and prevent its breakdown? Do they support policies that incentivize marriage and encourage the virtues and norms on which its success depends? Or do they promote and reinforce the sexual revolution and its effects in the name of celebrating family diversity—or in the name of destigmatizing, or of being nonjudgmental, or of providing income to those in need?
A virtue-based understanding of social justice may help us toward a different, more empowering orientation that helps us build and sustain a culture of marriage, one that makes it easier for individuals to develop the virtues needed for marriage, even while helping those in problematic (to themselves) nonmarital situations.
Social Justice as a Virtue
J. Brian Benestad, in his outstanding introduction to Catholic social doctrine, says:
The contemporary concern for social justice leads primarily to a stress on public-policy initiatives, to a reorganization of “the system,” and to social reform. In addition, there is a tendency to regard social justice as a principle of rights against society rather than as a virtue inclining a person to fulfill duties toward society. There is a stress on the demand for just treatment for others rather than the duty to act justly oneself.11
I do not discount the injustices resulting in a state of affairs in which marriage has largely collapsed for a large part of the population, or deny the need for public-policy initiatives. Instead, I want to suggest how a virtue-based understanding of social justice offers a fuller, more complete understanding of the challenge that social workers, other helping professionals, and we as a society currently face. An approach to social justice that looks primarily or exclusively to asserting claims on the state by or on behalf of others rests on an impoverished understanding of the human person, tends toward utopian statism and authoritarianism, and contradicts the best, most empowering traditions of social work.
Society will not be just unless individuals are virtuous. Political and economic structures in themselves cannot produce individual virtue. Nor can they provide the love and support that humans, as naturally social, “reciprocally indebted,” “dependent rational animals” need and for which the human heart longs.12 This is the claim of the whole of the central Christian tradition, from Augustine and Aquinas to the present. Its roots lie in the Christian understanding of human dignity as derived from our creation in the image and likeness of God. It draws on the ancient Greek understanding of the cardinal virtue of justice. In this classical Aristotelian-Thomist tradition, justice is rooted in natural law and what is objectively necessary for humans to flourish as they order their lives together.
In this tradition, justice and natural rights are, as Edward Feser says,
Safeguards of our ability to fulfill our moral obligations and realize our natural end. It follows that anything which tends to frustrate our ability to fulfill those obligations and realize those ends violates our rights and amounts to an injustice.13
So justice is the cardinal virtue by which, as a matter of habit and will, we give others what is due them. Aquinas defines justice, following Aristotle and Cicero, as “the habit whereby an individual renders to each one his due (ius) by a constant and habitual will.”14 If we frustrate the ability of another to fulfill her moral obligations—say to worship God (which implies the right to religious freedom, as the American founders argued) or to preserve her life or that of her child—we act unjustly.
How do we get from this classical concept of the virtue of justice to social justice as a virtue? Feser continues:
And if that which frustrates this ability [to fulfill our moral obligations] is not merely the actions of a particular individual or group of individuals, but something inherent in the very structure of a society—in its legal code, its cultural institutions, or the tenor of its public life—then what we have can meaningfully be described as a social injustice. In particular, any society whose legal framework fails to protect the lives of its weakest members, whose popular culture is shot through and through with a spirit of contempt for and ridicule of the demands of the natural law, or whose economic structure makes it effectively impossible for a worker to support himself and his family with his wages, is to that extent an unjust society, a socially unjust society.15
Social justice can be defined as the virtue that inclines individuals to work with others for the common good. It is justice in directing the virtues to giving others their due, and social, as Novak argues, in a double sense.16 First, it aims at the common good rather than at what is due another individual (as in the commutative justice that inclines one to equitable exchanges between individuals). Second, it involves joining with others to achieve a common purpose that individuals cannot achieve on their own. It is the virtue of association, the virtue par excellence of civil society.
Marriage Does Not Just Happen
The collapse of marriage is perhaps the cardinal social injustice of our time. As we saw and as research clearly documents, most injustices that social workers confront in their daily work at any level hinge in some way on this one. What would it take to sustain an environment or ecosystem in which marriage and marriage-based families could thrive?
Philosopher Michael Pakaluk has offered what even those who disagree with his vision might consider as a thought experiment. In a brief essay, he offers an opportunity to open oneself, at least temporarily and with tentative sympathy, to a traditional view of marriage. He writes:
Here is marriage, considered in context. A young man and woman remain chaste, and they have the virtue of “purity” (an old-fashioned word, but it is real). As a result, they have joy, and an ideal of the complete gift of self is readily understandable to them. They fall in love but do not “date” so much as “court” with reverence, each viewing the other as an almost divine gift.
They don’t have the baggage that comes with sleeping around. They don’t cohabit. They don’t think that oral sex is a sign of love, or even that it’s sex.
The death to self and complete binding of each to the other which they gleefully accept on their wedding day makes it also easy for them to accept their complete and total binding to a child for life, who incarnates their love into a single being. That is to say, they are “open to life.” They so cherish their bond that they have no private good except what comes through their union, and they place the safeguarding of that bond so high that it is a priority, for them, equivalent to faith, honor, religion, worship, and life itself.17
What Pakaluk describes here is not a utopian ideal made out of whole cloth in the imagination of a social reformer. It is, as he says, “in Shakespeare and other classical authors and, in Christendom, it used to be something like the ordinary experience of (how can I put it?) people who were well brought up. (Think: Song of Songs.)” It rests implicitly on an understanding of man’s nature and destiny as the creature whom God, who is love, created out of love, for love, who “cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.”18
The point here is not to look back with nostalgia on an imagined golden age when there was no fornication, adultery, or other sexual vice. It is to remind us how completely the possibilities and understandings of marriage depicted by Shakespeare in As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing, or in the novels of Jane Austen, have ceased to be socially available. What Pakaluk describes “is lived today, is even attainable, by only a handful of persons.” Yet, he continues, “anyone who understands historic Christianity, and is well read, must hold (I think) that it would be desirable for culture once again to make such a way of life generally attainable.”
What Pakaluk diagnoses is a grave social injustice in the sense defined by Feser, “something inherent in the very structure of society—in its legal code, its cultural institutions, or the tenor of its public life—that tends to frustrate our ability to fulfill our moral obligations and realize our natural end.” The kind of life-affirming marriage and marriage-based family culture Pakaluk describes has been swept away, above all for the lower socioeconomic strata, by the cultural and legal changes of the past half-century.
So how is such a marriage, one consonant with our nature and destiny and corresponding to our deepest longings, possible today? Pakaluk goes on:
But a culture cannot be created or sustained by a single person; it can barely be kept alive by a family; and it certainly cannot be created or transmitted without sound education. So, the immediate path forward for marriage, regardless of the Supreme Court, is the creation and fostering of institutions where modesty and purity are practiced with full confidence and self-knowledge.19
Is Marriage Possible?
There are two main responses to the current state of affairs. One is to normalize and even to celebrate the collapse of marriage in the name of diversity of family forms. We talk not of the family, but of families. The aim is to offset the negative effects of this social breakdown on children and women. This has been done both by the destigmatization of nonmarital births, divorce, sex that is delinked from marriage and children, and also by using government programs to meet the needs of low-income women and children.
Another response is to seek, by policy incentives or personal influence, to change the behavior of “target populations.” Welfare reform, with its marriage promotion measures and time limits, did this in 1996.
The first approach offers direct relief, but at the risk of legitimating behavior and situations that harm children, society, and the institution of marriage. It maintains the poor in their poverty and reinforces the very cultural forces in the structure of society that undermine marriage and the marriage-based family. These forces celebrate the unencumbered autonomous self and the claims of adults at the expense of their obligations to children.
The second approach runs the risk of dividing society into sinners and saints, those whose behavior needs to change and those who want to bring about the change . . . in others. One approach calls evil good and good evil (Is 5:20); the other inclines to moral superiority.
Is a both/and approach possible, one that recognizes the need for immediate help for those plunged into or maintained in poverty by the collapse of marriage, while at the same time strengthens and rebuilds a culture of marriage rather than assuming and even incentivizing its breakdown? In one way, this is the perennial problem of social policy and social work, and indeed helping in general—the problem that the English Poor Law reformers of the 1830s wrestled with. A social-justice perspective, with its emphasis on the personal virtues and on the associations or mediating structures of civil society, offers a different way of looking at the problem.
Social justice cannot be reduced either to redistribution or to reform of government policies or institutions, though it does not exclude either. It requires virtue on the part of each individual in society so that all can contribute to the common good. In joining with others in civil society, citizens can support the institution of marriage while remedying those social injustices in law, culture, and the tenor of public life that put a healthy marriage beyond reach for many.
A social-justice perspective takes sin seriously, seeing, as Solzhenitsyn put it, the dividing line between good and evil not as running between social groups or political parties, but as going through the human heart. It begins, not with priggish finger wagging, but with the recognition that we are all sinners and affected by sin, not least sins associated with the breakdown of marriage and its effects on children.
In his provocative and startling essay “The Moral Structure of Pedophilia,” Anthony Esolen draws our attention to the moral harm caused by the shift away from a child-centered view of marriage and the marriage-based family.20 In his view, marriage provides the optimum setting for bearing and raising children. In its place, our society upholds an adult-centered view of marriage as being about adult relationships, an intense form of friendship. Esolen shows how our failure to give children their due penetrates far more deeply and pervasively than the most obvious and appalling cases. The obvious cases are the ones in which the claims of children are subordinated to the desires of adults. We have failed children systemically in ways that permeate our cultural institutions, laws, and public life.
Esolen shows this failure by posing the question: How does pedophilia differ in our minds from other kinds of sexual expression? Its moral structure, he says, “is simply this: the welfare of children is subordinate to the sexual gratification of adults.” Lack of consent cannot in itself be morally decisive when we compel children to do all kinds of things to which they do not consent:
If we altered the question, and asked not how many people have done sexually abusive things with children, but how many people have done sexual things that redounded to the suffering of children, then we might confess that the only thing that separates millions of people from Jerry Sandusky is inclination. Everything that was once considered a sexual evil and that is now winked at or cheered, everything without exception, has served to hurt children, and badly.
Divorce is a case in point:
Unless it is necessary to remove oneself and one’s children from physical danger and moral corruption, the old wisdom regarding divorce should hold, if children themselves have anything to say about it. Parents will say, “My children can never be happy unless I am happy,” but they should not lay that narcissistic unction to their souls. Children need parents who love them, not parents who are happy; they are too young to be asked to lay down their lives for someone else. It is not the job of the child to suffer for the parent, but the job of the parent to endure, to make the best of a poor situation, to swallow his pride, to bend her knees, for the sake of the child.
The same applies to births out of wedlock:
The child has a right to enter more than a little nursery decorated with presents from a baby shower. He should enter a human world, a story, a people. He should be born of a mother and a father among uncles and aunts and cousins and grandparents, stretching into the distant past, with all their interrelated histories, with his very being reflected in all those mirrors of relation, not to mention his eyes and his hair, the talents in his fingers and the cleverness in his mind. This belonging to a big and dependable world can be secured only in the context of the permanent love of his mother and father, declared by a vow before the community and before the One in whom there is no shadow of alteration.
This neglect of the interests of children is endemic in our culture. Consider the way we talk, not only about marriage, but also about things like artificial reproductive technologies or surrogacy.21
What Is to Be Done?
What is to be done? Feser argues that the “duty of remedying such injustices rests, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, primarily with individuals, families, and private associations.”22 That principle also recognizes, as part of natural law, the state’s duty to deal with those injustices that cannot effectively be remedied in this way. But when the state confirms in law “what was already the practice, trend, and effect of an alternative culture that had its immediate origin in the 1950s and ’60s,” then the task falls all the more heavily on the associations of civil society.23
As Sherif Girgis, Ryan Anderson, and Robert George reflected after two important Supreme Court decisions concerning the definition of marriage:
If you believe, as we do, in the importance to children and to society of the marriage-based family, then of course you were hoping for different results in yesterday’s marriage cases. But you probably also put your trust in the institutions of civil society—in that vast arena between man and state which is the real stage for human development. And in that case, you never expected a court of law to do our work for us, to rescue a marriage culture that has been wounded for decades by cohabitation, out-of-wedlock child-bearing, and misguided policies like no-fault divorce.24
Whatever one’s opinion about the Supreme Court’s decisions concerning marriage, or the scope for any legal measures to address the collapse of marriage, the task remains for social work what it was. In line with its historic emphasis since the Charity Organization Societies and the Settlement House movement, its task of empowerment is still to combat social injustice by strengthening families and communities. The challenge is to work out how to help rebuild a culture of marriage in civil society, especially in the poorer half of the population where the disintegration has been most complete and devastating in its effects.
Attempts to promote and strengthen marriage come in various forms. At the policy level, there are attempts to remove disincentives like the marriage tax penalty, and otherwise to incentivize marriage and make it easier for people to meet their moral obligations—of spouses to each other, to their children, and to society.
In 2004, a group of social scientists produced a list of policy proposals under the head, “Can Government Strengthen Marriage?”25 They proposed a shift of emphasis from preventing teen pregnancy to preventing unwed pregnancy, since the data revealed no benefits to delaying nonmarital birth into the twenties, but considerable benefits to getting married before having children. They recommended support for marriage preparation education to reduce violence, conflict, and unnecessary divorce; lengthening the waiting period for no-fault divorce; removing perverse incentives to cohabit rather than marry; and evaluating and strengthening the pro-marriage aspects of the 1996 welfare reform (among other things). All these measures can be understood as promoting an ecology that fosters the virtues required for and developed by marriage.
Such efforts flew in the face of the sexual revolution and its increasing adoption as law and official government policy. As Alvaré argues, recent court rulings promoting a culture of “sexualityism” can only be understood as the government’s systematic embrace of and commitment to sex without consequences.26 Government, not least through its imposition of an HHS mandate that requires employers to enable access to contraceptive—even abortifacient—drugs, as well as to sterilization, is promoting the destruction of marriage by normalizing and promoting the delinking of sex from marriage and from both the bearing of children and their rearing by the two parents who made them.
Little wonder then, that supporters of marriage and marriage-based families put little faith in government and its capacity for interest in promoting a culture of marriage. I will leave aside further discussion of the kind of social policy measures that have been my bread and butter as a policy analyst. Instead, I will look at some approaches within civil society to promote and sustain the kind of culture that makes the vision of marriage described by Pakaluk attainable by those who want it. I will also look at what is involved in promoting the virtue of social justice in social workers themselves, as well as in the families and communities they work with.
Building an Alternative: Reculer pour Mieux Sauter
In the famous ending of his After Virtue, Alisdair MacIntyre recalls the example of Saint Benedict as he considers a way forward in our own dark ages: “What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.”27 In our own dire times, “the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have been governing us for quite some time.”28 “Benedict’s greatness,” MacIntyre explains, “lay in making possible a quite new kind of institution, that of the monastery of prayer, learning, and labor, in which and around which communities could not only survive, but flourish, in a period of social and cultural darkness.”29
Our own times are very different from Benedict’s, and a Benedict for our times would, as MacIntyre writes, doubtless be very different. Combined with MacIntyre’s call for construction of local forms of community, the monastic example suggests the need—alongside local or parish-level initiatives to support marriage in a hostile environment—for distinctly Christian communities centered on faith and family.
MacIntyre’s call to construct local forms of community, combined with the need in our time to rebuild an authentic culture of marriage and Benedict’s example of a strong community of faith and learning, brings into focus the promise of a small, seriously Catholic Christian university and community like Ave Maria in Southwest Florida. To what extent is a modern day analog of sorts to the strategy of Saint Benedict possible? Can it build not only a center of learning, culture, and faith in contrast to the received wisdom of the contemporary Zeitgeist, but also specifically a culture of marriage closer to Pakaluk’s vision? Can it serve both as a beacon to attract or guide others, keeping things alive that would otherwise be lost, and also as a training ground to prepare people to go out into the world and, in the current phrase, “evangelize the culture”?
To this combination of university and community, we may add the path-breaking work of Mary Eberstadt on the profound impact of the pill as the technological base of the sexual revolution and on the relation between faith and family—Adam and Eve after the Pill (2012), and How the West Really Lost God (2013).30 Eberstadt confirms the strong link between religious observance and high fertility rates, but she emphasizes the ways in which large families foster religious observance and not simply the other way around. Children drive their parents to church, as she puts it. She notes how Christianity in particular, with its Holy Family, its God the Father who loves, guides, and protects, with a Son who addresses God the Father as Abba (Daddy), and so forth, is near to unintelligible in communities where fathers who love and protect their families are rare. Christianity and the family, she argues and shows empirically, rise and fall together.
Ave Maria is a community of large families and strong faith, each reinforcing the other. A faithful Christian community and locus of Catholic learning and culture, it attracts many who live in isolation from these things but are drawn to them. It is home both to Pakaluk, chair of the university’s philosophy department, and to Novak and me. The marriage Pakaluk describes could be that of his own daughters. The reference to Shakespeare recalls students’ involvement in the plays, As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing, that a class on Shakespeare in Performance presented in recent years, playing, as Michael Novak put it, “characters their own age, with the distinctively tender and fragile feelings, high excitements and crushing blows of that gloriously vulnerable time of life.”31 In the exhilaration of the performances, one could sense the identification over the centuries of a shared culture of marriage, a shared understanding of the sincere gift of self it involves—the gift of the couple to each other and to the children that may result from their comprehensive union, a union at once emotional, bodily, and a matter of will. Play and audience share an understanding of marriage as the institution through which each generation sacrifices itself for the next.
Patiently Explain: In Hostile Territory
Serious Catholics and other Christians, social workers not least, live and work amidst hostile liberal-secular media, academia, and legal, political, and professional elites. In this aggressively secular world, sexual expressionism, the ideology of the sexual revolution, is absolute dogma and state religion, dissent from which will not be tolerated. For this cultural elite, the Catholic Church’s organized structure and presence in the public square are the main obstacle to their vision of the future, which they seek unrelentingly to impose everywhere, all talk of respecting other cultures notwithstanding.
Most families in Ave Maria chose to live in the Florida swampland, far from a major city or other centers of learning, because they had experience of a beige, accommodationist Catholicism in their former parishes and saw the erosion of faith and family around them. Ave Maria attracts many others too, even though they do not live there, as a beacon reflecting and keeping alive the light of faith amidst the powerful forces that seek to extinguish it as a public presence in their world. It does not substitute for other strategies for building a strong culture of marriage, faith, and family. But it helps. It is an example of the virtue of social justice practiced by members of a community, joining together in many groups and projects to further the common good, not least creating and fostering a culture of marriage that corresponds to the nature and destiny of the human person as imago Dei.
While Ave Maria as a community tends to attract intense hostility from comment box writers whenever it is mentioned, most faithful Christians who remain within the orthodox Judeo-Christian tradition in matters of life, death, sex, and marriage face hostility without such solid community support, as individuals or congregations, as employees, parents, or small entrepreneurs trying to make their way and retain their integrity, often condemned, in Justice Scalia’s words describing the effect of the Supreme Court’s DOMA decision, as hostes humani generis—enemies of the human race.32
Navigating this hostile terrain is a different challenge that has elicited many initiatives, mostly lay-led, at the parish or cross-parish level. The Stand With Children movement in California, with its Faith and Action Circles, offers one outstanding example of a grassroots effort.33 In Norway, the government is rethinking its attitude toward divorce and encouraging “date nights” for couples to sustain marriages and reduce divorce rates.34 For several reasons—a different view of the role of government and the present government’s commitment to the sexual revolution among them—such a strategy is highly improbable in the United States. That is true, at least, for government, but not necessarily within parishes or other intermediary groups of civil society.
The people involved in these grassroots activities exercised the virtue of social justice by joining together for the common good, the good of marriage and marriage-based families. They did so in face of overwhelmingly powerful forces tending toward their dissolution. These forces include both political and cultural movements and the pressures of the sexual revolution on individual families. Among the effects are the normalizing and increased incidence of divorce, including the devastating impact of no-fault or unilateral divorce, pornography, sex before and outside of marriage presented as the norm by media and “enlightened opinion,” cohabitation, and children raised without one or either of their parents. Unfortunately, social work has done much harm in promoting and normalizing some of these developments.
Social workers, indeed, have had little to do with the developments I have described that promote a positive culture of marriage. Despite our literature and tradition of empowerment-based practice, we have tended to think of social justice not as a virtue at all, not as rights derived from God or moral obligations or duties, but as claims on the state in the name of equality. Social justice becomes a series of demands on government aimed at a desired state of affairs, with no connection to personal character. This is at best a very partial understanding of social justice.
The Professional Challenge
Possibilities for practicing and promoting the virtue of social justice in oneself and one’s clients vary for social workers according to employment and funding constraints. There is no straightforward answer to the question of what is to be done—the “practice implications.” Here I want to discuss some of the challenges social workers face in trying to orient their own practice to the social justice of which I speak. What principles might guide us in meeting our own moral obligation to the common good and helping those we work with to meet theirs?
In Aristotle and Aquinas, justice is the virtue that orders all the virtues to the common good. Habitually giving others their due requires, in Benestad’s words, “the laborious effort to prepare one’s soul for action through the cultivation of the virtues and the acquisition of knowledge. . . . Some works of justice require very sophisticated knowledge and very great effort to control pride, anger, and fear as well as love of pleasure, money, honor, and power.”35 In the language of the virtues, we recognize the dual emphasis in social-work education on acquiring knowledge and on the qualities of character, like those of self-effacement, prudence, courage, and self-mastery, needed for the “professional use of self” in practice.
Marriage and its breakdown present particular challenges to social work. Marriage requires virtues on the part of the couple, their families, and the community. It requires a culture of marriage to support the gift of self that is comprehensive, permanent, and faithful. This gift and the culture that supports it assure any children that result from the spouses’ union the emotional, financial, and legal support and the kin of the two parents who made them. Marriage doesn’t just happen, and the cultural, political, and economic structures needed to support it, or even understand it, are in disarray.
These conditions for healthy marriage barely exist for most of the people social workers work with, or even, in many cases, for the workers themselves. I have found Master of Social Work (MSW) students incredulous at research that shows that cohabitation is not equivalent to marriage, that women are safer from intimate-partner violence in marriage than in other kinds of relationships, that children do better when they are raised by their own married mother and father, and so on. Part of the reason for their surprise, no doubt, is the ideological miseducation that students of marriage and family routinely receive as undergraduates. Part is that many of the MSW students sitting in the classroom themselves live with partners and/or children outside of marriage and marriage-based families. Their discernment of reality is blurred by cognitive dissonance, denial, or defensiveness.
Decades of promoting, normalizing, and celebrating alternatives to marriage have done immense damage to professional helpers as well as to those they aim to help. The task of social-work education today—in helping students acquire the knowledge, the virtues, and the habits of the heart they need to be effective—is formidable.
Three Principles
I conclude with three principles to guide a way forward.
1. We have to face the reality of marriage’s disappearance as a socially available, attainable choice among much of the population. We need to acknowledge at a deep level the effects of that destruction in widening inequality, perpetuating poverty, and damaging mothers’ and fathers’ ability to meet their moral obligations to each other and their children. We need a sense of the sin through which we have corrupted marriage as an ideal and the social injustice perpetrated in particular against the poor and children.
2. We need a sense of the joy of marriage as understood in Christian tradition, as described by Pakaluk (and Shakespeare and the Song of Songs), as rooted in a chaste longing in the human heart. Marriage offers an opportunity for the sincere gift of self through which humans find fulfillment.
3. As Christians, we understand that God’s mercy and forgiveness are greater than our sin, including social sin. As social workers or Christians or concerned citizens, we have to find ways to offer hope to and support for initiatives in civil society through which people exercise the virtue of social justice, joining with others to rebuild a culture of marriage.