Earlier this spring, The Park Ridge Center hosted an evening conversation with Don and Carol Browning on "Health, Faith and the Family: Should Professionals be Interested in Strong Marriages and Families?" Dr. Browning, the Alexander Campbell Professor of Religious Ethics and the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago Divinity School, directs the Lilly-supported Religion, Culture and Family Project. Carol, a musician and piano teacher, serves as research associate to the project. This is an edited version of their remarks.
Marital disruption and unhappiness correlate with a whole range of unfavorable consequences for men, women, children, work place, and a host of other social ills. Marital disruption costs taxpayers and damages the health of both adults and children.
The recent federal welfare reform law acknowledges that strengthening marriage and families is the major motivation for this legislation. Several states are considering requiring marriage counseling and one of the new marriage compatibility inventories before granting marriage licenses. Some states are instituting mandatory couple and family counseling at the time of divorce.
Married men are much more likely to live longer than any of the other categories.
Why? First, marriage appears to reduce risky and unhealthy behaviors. Second, marriage increases material well-being — income, assets and wealth — to purchase better medical care, better diet, and safer surroundings. Third, marriage provides people with a network of help and support. Fourth, marriage provides adults with a readily available sex partner, something most people consider a great human good.
Married couples have two extended families, and they build up good social networks. They also have each other as confidantes. This is good for their own psychological well-being, as well as for their children. Their own good mental health enables them to do a better job of raising their children. Children do better with intact, two-parent families.
A 1992 study showed that depression is now a major health problem in the United States, costing about $16 billion and leading to 30,000 suicides annually. Depression is on the rise worldwide, particularly in younger people. Explanations for the causes include doubling of the divorce rate, drop in parents' time available to children, and an increased mobility.
Other explanations have to do with the ascendance of individualism, a waning of beliefs in religion, and a decline in community and family support that can buffer you against setbacks and failures.
Why has marriage, with all its benefits, declined? Linda Waite (University of Chicago) offers the following reasons: More women are now employed; high divorce rates decrease people's certainty about the long-run stability of their marriages, and thus may reduce their willingness to invest in it; and changes in divorce laws have shifted much of the financial burden for the breakup of the marriage to women, making investment in marriage a riskier proposition.
Men, in turn, may find marriage and parenthood less attractive because they face the loss of contact with their children if their marriage dissolves. Women are now less dependent on men's financial support. Public policies that support single mothers and changing attitudes toward sex outside marriage, toward unmarried childbearing, and toward divorce have all been implicated to explain the decline of marriage.
Don: The language of health is riddled with what moral philosophers call teleological language. It is the language of goods — the goods of bodily health, the goods of mental health, the goods of pleasure, the goods of material wealth, and the goods of agency — the capacity to act with confidence and dispatch in the pursuit of other goods such as jobs, education, and friendships.
It is a language that plays down obligation and commitment and plays up individual and social benefits and consequences.
The language of religion is often thought to have little to do with the teleological language of relative goods. The language of religion sounds more like the language of love, obligation, commitment, loyalty, ordinance, law, and judgment. It would seem strange to hear in a wedding ceremony the words, "I, Jim, take you, Mary, to be my lawful wife because I know that in so doing, I will live longer, get richer, have a better heart, learn to give up smoking, and get more really satisfying sex than if I remain single."
Those using the language of health to support marriage almost always at some point require the language of commitment, but often have difficulty explaining it, grounding it, and showing how it fits with the good of health.
On the other hand, religious people who specialize in the language of commitment, covenant, or sacrament almost always invoke the language of health and the goods it represents.
Our quest for a genuine public good and our quest for a more authentic religious language will be most completely realized when we learn how to reconcile these two languages. I believe that can happen best when religious language is seen as the most encompassing and inclusive.
It is easier to show how the language of commitment has within it a consideration of the goods of life than it is to show why, in the pursuit of individual health, we should commit ourselves to another person.
