The monogamy revolution

Marriage protects the most vulnerable among us by controlling the sexual behavior of the most powerful, but the trend in modern feminism, perhaps unaware of history, views monogamous marriage as an institution created by men to control women’s sexual behavior. This is, of course, nonsense.

In Sex and the Citizen (Bombardier Books, 254 pp.), Conn Carroll, the Washington Examiner’s opinion editor and my former colleague, offers a full-throated defense of marriage, and of Christian marriage particularly, albeit from outside a faith-based perspective. He also highlights the threat marriage’s decline poses to civilization and modern democracy, marshaling a vast body of historical and scientific literature to explain in layman’s terms how we got here.

Carroll frames his argument in terms of four sexual revolutions. The first relies on evolutionary theories: The original rise of monogamy, he suggests, created the conditions for humanity’s biological survival. Carroll claims that only by cooperating within long-term, monogamous relationships could hunter-­gatherer humans consistently find for themselves and their offspring the massive amounts of food needed to sustain our disproportionately large brains.

He suggests the second sexual revolution came about 10,000 years ago, when agriculture supplanted a hunter-­gatherer lifestyle. Storable wealth in the form of commodity foods became concentrated in relatively few hands. In consequence, relatively few wealthy men accumulated multiple wives and concubines, at the expense of the vast unfortunate majority. Carroll cites genetic research suggesting 17 women passed along their genes to offspring for every man doing so during this period.

This polygamous era lasted for the majority of recorded history. Its effects linger on: For example, geneticists believe that 8% of Central Asian men today descend directly from Genghis Khan.

But polygamy was highly destabilizing. The great Khan’s short-lived empire, geographically the largest in world history, could be built only because so many men didn’t contribute to the gene pool. “The excess man problem of polygamy can be solved,” Carroll says, “but only by devising a rapacious war machine that can never stop conquering.”

Christianity inaugurated the third sexual revolution: a restoration of true monogamy that changed the world forever in two ways. First, sex would never again be just a physical act, but a fundamental joining of a man and a woman in “one flesh.” Second, the same sexual ethics would apply to everyone.

The Romans had approved of male promiscuity while condemning it in women, but Christianity taught that it was wrong for both sexes. Moreover, Christianity made sexual immorality wrong for both masters and slaves. “At least in theory,” Carroll writes, “both the rich and the poor had equal sexual integrity for the first time in human history.”

Christian sexual ethics also created a pathway toward democracy as the Church undermined the European aristocracy’s patriarchal power. The Church restricted the right of inheritance to legitimate offspring and forbade cousin-­marriages, which families had used to consolidate wealth. The requirement for spousal consent, if not always honored, also limited arranged marriages.

Christianity brought other stabilizing influences, such as the end of gender-­based infant exposure, a reform that helped restore balance to the sexes. In parts of the Roman Empire, the exposure of girls was so prevalent that there were seven men for every five women. Christianity thus fixed polygamy’s excess-male problem. War didn’t end, but this sexual revolution generated the stability that paved the way for modernity.

Carroll cites Harvard evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich as concluding that European peoples exposed longer to the Church’s teachings on sexuality “exhibited more individualism, less conformity, and a greater likelihood to trust non-family members.” And Carroll views America, with its unprecedented egalitarianism, as the exemplar of what long-term exposure to Christian marriage can do to a society.

In 1946, a Supreme Court justice penned a dissent defending Mormon polygamy as one perfectly valid lifestyle choice among many. This signaled the incipient fourth sexual revolution, characterized by moral relativism and absolute individualism in all matters sexual.

Bolstered by the pseudo-science of Margaret Mead and Alfred Kinsey, this revolution birthed our own lonely, gender-confused world. The federal welfare state exacerbated the problem by creating economic incentives for broken families, which most acutely afflicted those at the lower end of the income scale, especially the black community. Prior to 1960, a higher percentage of black women than white women were married. By 2020, the share of married black women was only 27%—a fraction of the nation’s already low 48% overall.

While some celebrate the demise of marriage as the greatest possible outcome for society, Carroll argues that damage to marriage is itself damage to democracy. Society remains freer when a greater number of citizens are happy and self-sufficient. It suffers when families break up—when people lose their support systems and can no longer ­sustain themselves. The destruction of monogamy exacerbates income and wealth inequality, increases social isolation, worsens political polarization, increases male criminality, and sends our nation’s population into decline.

Carroll recommends several pro-­family policy changes, asserting, perhaps too optimistically, that “politics can change a culture.” I agree with him at least that government can stop making things worse.

Far from being an instrument of female oppression, marriage is the institution that originally put women on a more equal footing with men. And a wealth of social science literature on the topic shows that many of our nation’s problems, especially those of our most disadvantaged communities, are related to the decline of the nuclear family.

The modern alternatives—hook-up culture, polyamory, low-commitment cohabitation, and loneliness—certainly offer society nothing positive.

Carroll does not approach his topic from within a Christian worldview, so it is especially noteworthy that he arrives at the same conclusions traditional Christians espouse as a matter of faith. Our civilization has too much to lose by abandoning the sacred marriage bond. As Carroll convincingly argues, we are at risk of losing a powerful, wholesome, stabilizing force that has been cultivated over the centuries, and of returning to something much more cruel.

—David Freddoso, a New York Times bestselling author, is deputy opinion editor at The Hill