Habits of Happy Couples and Abortion Pill Reversal

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

The issues that matter most, right here, The Drew Mariani Show.

Ed Morissey (0:05)

On Relevant Radio.

JP DeGance (0:10)

There's a world view crisis, and we used to aspire to and desire and seek Christian marriage as a core part of our life's purpose.

And that expectation has gone away. We have experienced a 75 percent decline since 1970, the number of people getting sacramentally married, right? So that phenomenon is, in many ways, advanced in subtle ways and not so subtle ways, even by parents in the pews who don't know that they're advancing a world view that may actually be in opposition.

SPEAKER_1 (0:51)

It's The Drew Mariani Show on Relevant Radio.

Ed Morissey (0:56)

Welcome back, everyone. I'm Ed Morissey of hotair.com, filling in for Drew today, taking your calls at 888-914-9149, 888-914-9149.

That was JP DeGance on the marriage crisis facing the global Catholic Church. Some really shocking numbers there. There's also some reason for hope too in these same studies that we are seeing. And some of this relates back to my experiences at the Synod of the Family. And I'm blanking as to whether that was 2014 or 2015 Nick and I were discussing this off the air. I need to check my notes a little bit more often on the Synod and the Family. But this was part of that discussion at the Vatican in that period. And it was a really remarkable discussion about family structures, how to reach people within non-traditional family structures and spread the Gospel and spread the hope of Christ. And one of the main ways of doing this, and Nick now tells me it was 2014 See, this is a reason why Nick is such a great producer. He can just feed you this information. Thanks, Nick. I appreciate that.

It was imperative, I think, to find ways to communicate in positive, loving ways. And I think the Catholic Church has done a pretty good job of that.

It's still early days. I mean, in church time, 10 years, 11 years, 12 years, that's still pretty recent. And we're going to find out how we're doing on that and where we need to go next. And we're going to be talking with Grant Bailey about this study. Grant Bailey is the Deputy Director of Get Married Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. You can find them at ifstudies.org. Grant, thanks so much for being with us today.

Grant Bailey (2:42)

No, thanks for having me.

Ed Morissey (2:44)

You know, this is the... Marriage is so important to the Catholic faith, to the Christian faith, because marriage is the formation for the Trinitarian life. This is where men and women who are called to family life, and not everybody is called to family life, but those men and women who aren't entering the religious life are generally called to family life, and to dedicate their creative power within a sacramental marriage, which creates a loving relationship between husband, wife, and God of Caritas. That is where the creative spirit flows, so that you create children, and the children can grow up formed in that. I mean, that's a key part of our faith.

And to a certain extent, it's a little disturbing when you hear that marriages have fallen off 74% over the last 50 years or so.

But the question is, are we better formed? Are the marriages that are taking place better formed than they used to be? And Grant, I think that there's reason for hope in the studies that we're seeing here.

Grant Bailey (3:58)

Yeah. So this study that we did, we were drawing on a number of sources of data, and that 74% number comes from CARA at Georgetown, which tracks the number of marriages in the Catholic Church. We looked at going back to 1970 And so there's a 74% decline in sacramental marriages, right? Those that are being done within the church. So of course, there's a lot of people who identify as Catholics and who attend church, who have gotten married outside of the church. So it's not tracked by that data. But it does track a general trend that we see for declines in marriage in America.

And then also declines of sacramental marriages within the church and then just declines in religion in America, both among Catholics, but then Protestants. So this is one of those things that we're seeing. We're seeing these declines, the sort of bad news from those who sort of recognize how important marriage is for, you know, the general development of people as they sort of grow older and sort of mature and grow in virtue.

But the other side of this is sort of interesting is we've recently seen, actually, we've been seeing for some time now, declines in divorce. And we've seen that married people are substantially happier than single people. And those trends have continued going back over the same decades. And with this study, we surveyed a few thousand married people in America. And we found that, you know, one, married people are happier, but then even those within marriage, religious people report stronger marriages, more stable marriages. And so it's a bit of a paradox, right? We see declines in religiosity, declines in marriage. But we see that religious married people are some of, not the happiest sub-populations in America today.