The flight from marriage

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REICHARD: You’re listening to a special weekend edition of The World and Everything in It. I’m Mary Reichard.

Today we’re talking about something that affects every community, every church, and every child in America: marriage.

My guest is J.P. De Gance, President and CEO of Communio, a nonprofit that has worked with churches across the country to measurably strengthen marriages and reduce divorce. He’s led an initiative that helped dramatically drive down the divorce rate in the city of Jacksonville, Florida… and he’s also co-author of Endgame: The Church’s Strategic Move to Save Faith and Family in America.

J.P. argues that the decline of marriage isn’t just a cultural trend — it’s at the root of weakening faith, rising fatherlessness, and growing social instability. So let’s talk about it!

J.P., welcome.

J.P. DEGANCE: Hey, thank you, Mary. Great to be with you.

REICHARD: Well, let's set the big picture first. Why is marriage the most important social institution in America?

DEGANCE: Yeah, look, if we care about happiness and life fulfillment, it all is downstream of our world's flight from marriage. The state, generally, is solving the problem through three steps. It's through either medication, education or incarceration. The increased spending in those areas is all inversely related to the share of households married.

REICHARD: Well, you've described this feedback loop between falling marriage rates and the decline of faith. Elaborate on that. What do you mean?

DEGANCE: Yeah, so it turns out in the United States, the rise of non-marital households preceded by about 25 years the rise of religious non-affiliation. And it's my central case in the nationwide study on faith and relationships, that this phenomenon, the rise of non marital households and those raised in them, is causing the decline of Christianity. 

And you see this confirmed in a lot of different ways, one of which is just the number of people in church on Sunday. If you look at those sitting in the pews, 80% of everybody sitting there underneath the age of 60 grew up in a home with continuously married parents. And this holds, this holds true regardless of age, right? So the, so the youngest people, let's just say you're a single man born around the year 2000 and you're sitting in church on Sunday, or you're a married man in church on Sunday born in 1964, 81% of men from both demographics sitting in church on Sunday grew up in an intact married family. So if we're really concerned about there being too few men in church on Sunday born around the year 2000 it's because there's too few of them who grew up in a continuously married home. 

REICHARD: Causing the decline of Christianity. Wow. Well, let's dig into that diagnosis a little bit further. What do you think is the single biggest myth about marriage that young adults believe today?

DEGANCE: That it's old, it's outdated, it's not important for my life fulfillment and life satisfaction. There's new Pew data, particularly amongst high school senior girls, who are, we've seen a seismic shift where, in the year 1993, 80, north of 80% of them said it was a priority, a high life priority, and that dropped by 20 points over the following 30 year period. So our young people aren't prioritizing it, because they're largely being told that the most important thing is, is career, career success. Okay? And actually, the newest data out shows that if we're really concerned about happiness and fulfillment, all of those things like career fulfill, like career success, income success, all of that is dwarfed by the life satisfaction that comes from being in a good marriage. 

The happiest people in America are actually married people with children. So, sharing that with our young people is incredibly important.

REICHARD: J.P., you have said that the church has been battered by standing aloft from the destruction of the family. It’s an indictment of the church really.

DEGANCE: You know, I think biblically speaking, we got away from the simple reality that marriage is the covenantal sign of salvation. Okay, it's there in the beginning of salvation history, in Genesis and all salvation history points to at the end of time, in the book of Revelation, with the eschatological wedding feast of the Lamb. It's everywhere. The nuptial meaning of Scripture is dripping from the minor to the major prophets, from Hosea to Isaiah. And you see it in the Apostle Paul's writings, where he elevates it. And he identifies that great mystery that the sacrificial love between husband and wife is that living icon of Christ's love for his bride, the Church, and I think on a fundamental level, we backed away from it out of fear. 

It's a fear of offending those who are from a non marital home, those who've had family and relationship trauma. And that fear has led the church to abdicate its role to form and catechize its people and in the absence of that, the world is forming and discipling our young people on marriage.

REICHARD: I think that there's a dilemma these days about the definition of marriage because we have what I call Obergfell marriages, we have common law marriages, we have nuptial marriages. Is part of this problem the confusion about what marriage actually means?

DEGANCE: I don't think there's any doubt that our policy and the ever fast-changing laws around marriage and the family, which accelerated with, you know, no fault divorce. Right? Which fundamentally reoriented the idea of marriage from being a healthy balance between the sharing of love and the right to enter with responsibility to our loved ones and our family. There's a reason marriage has always been a public act. It's because there's public consequences and so it carries both rights and responsibilities. 

No fault divorce, really, in many ways, weakened the responsibility side of marriage. And then you obviously have Obergefell, which is, frankly, a logical extension of the reasoning behind that. And now I'm not here advocating that the way to fix the situation is through ending no fault divorce as much as I'm, there's a variety of policy prescriptions I think that would help short of that. 

The bigger the bigger thing is to recognize that phenomenon has been at play. It has affected family stability significantly. And that has led to trauma in our culture, which has actually, I think, scared in many ways, a lot of pastors and local churches from engaging here. They want to be, we want to be winsome. And you hear comments, Mary, about marriage, the church being obsessed with sex, obsessed with marriage. 

Actually, it shows a biblical ignorance of the centrality of that covenantal sign of marriage. This is not accidental. Paul, when he lays out, again, that great mystery, okay. He, when he's showing us about the divine love story, his love for us, how Christ pursues us, it's not accidental that he tells that story through marriage. And it's also not a surprise that when marriage declines, okay, less people experience an earthly love story, less people then experience the love of an earthly father, and so less and less people accept the divine love story. And less and less people accept the love from the Heavenly Father.

REICHARD: Well, I can hear your passion for this topic and I can see why because I read that in Jacksonville, Florida, after using your intervention model, the divorce rate dropped 24%. Now, why is that? How did that happen?

DEGANCE: We have a lot of agency here. You know, I think one of the giant opponents we have is this idea that success in marriage is just, you know, a coin flip. You know, the reality is the vast majority of first time marriages will last a lifetime. That's between 60 and 65% of those who married today. And so what happened in Jackson was there's an entire academic field of marriage and relationship education. There's skills to be good and successful at marriage. And so we scaled through the local church the number of people who consumed that kind of Christian marriage relationship skills education. We had a phenomenal partner in Live the Life Ministries, providing boots on the ground with 93 churches. We saturated the area with digital outreach targeting those who were at highest risk for divorce. The net was that the divorce rate dropped 24% because we moved so many people through it—again 58,900—through that kind of ministry over just a three year period.

REICHARD: So, what would be a concrete example of one lever that really made a difference?

DEGANCE: OK. So zeroing right in, you've got something like the daily temperature reading that was part of that particular tool. And it was a simple exercise where people learn how to have a daily touch-in. With these mobile devices that we have, with the busyness of today, a lot of people are not able to share expectations of their day, what happened, new things that are happening. As a consequence, they also frequently have conflict over those expectations, and they don't have the skills to resolve those conflicts in a healthy way. So that daily temperature reading, which was one of the four tools that were part of that program, became actually taught, I think it was 27,000 times to people in the county as one. For instance based on the exit surveys that we're running in these particular programs, we know of concrete marriages that were saved over and over again.

REICHARD: Sounds like it boils down to plain old communication.

DEGANCE: Yeah, yeah. You know, look, a big challenge that we have is that 70 to 80% of divorces are not high conflict. People don't need counseling as much as they need coaching. They need to learn the tools and skills for them to communicate better, to share expectations better, to resolve conflict in a more healthy way. When you learn those skills and the tools that work in your marriage, to practice those skills, people—by and large—are able to resolve their own challenges and get out of them. A minority of folks can't. Right? Where there's higher conflict and there's bigger, deeper-seated issues like addiction or physical abuse. But the vast majority of marriages are not in that situation. So there's a big part that the church can play in being leaven in a solution here.

REICHARD: So let's talk about policy now. How does family law in this country unintentionally discourage marriage? Or maybe it's intentional.

DEGANCE: Yeah, no. Look, we're in this weird situation where our family law is a little bit, I would argue, like Frankenstein's monster. It's been built over time. It includes remnants of legal systems and assumptions that are no longer operable, joined with much more modern assumptions. You know, still today about 70% of divorce filers are women. There's this expectation that men are frequently on the short end of that stick. So you hear raised often by men who are advocating like, you know, really terrible men like Andrew Tate and others, advocating for men that they shouldn't even get married because it's a bad deal for them. 

And so family law, you know, I think of a policy solution that Kentucky recently passed,  where custody is now really balanced, unless there's clear evidence of abuse. And there's a 50% custodial situation that is the baseline assumption, and that, by itself, led to a 24% decline in divorce in the state of Kentucky almost overnight. 

So there's certainly a role for policy. Obviously, nobody is suggesting—and I am not suggesting—anybody should be in an unsafe situation. I have a close family member who was the victim of domestic violence, and my wife and I ended up raising her children. So this is deeply important to me for people to be safe. But there's ways that you can protect safety without having a system that so thoroughly discourages marriages in a lot of ways.

REICHARD: Tell me, what's one concrete thing I can do to improve my marriage?

DEGANCE: Okay, take 10 minutes of every day and set aside time with no devices, with no TV, no computer, and be situated that you are face to face and able to talk. Okay. And in that situation take a few moments for appreciation. Say one thing to your spouse that you appreciate that she did over the last, over the last day, the last week, and then, and then flip that around, have your spouse do the same thing. Just being able to hear someone say what they're grateful for is something we know in the Christian walk, a huge part of a healthy Christian spirituality is spending time to be grateful to God for all that we've been given. And actually we should be! God has given us the spouse to be our help, to be our help and aid in our journey to heaven. And so cultivating that 10 minutes, start off with something that you're grateful for over the last day, and I think setting that aside, that 10 minutes will change your marriage.

REICHARD: You know it reminds me, author Ross Campbell advises three things: physical touch, focused attention, and eye contact.

DEGANCE: All of the above. Face to face, being able to be even knee-to-knee, holding hands and have a conversation. And I think starting with appreciations. One of the things sometimes that we do is, if something great happened that day or that week, sometimes we forget to even share that with our spouse.

REICHARD: J.P., this reminds me of a child who was a friend of my son’s. I drove them from school to my house one afternoon. That child could not believe I was married to my son's father and that we as a family sat down to eat dinner together every night. Now this child had a drug-addicted mother, he had no dad, and I found out later he survived off eating from vending machines. How can somebody like that even understand marriage?

DEGANCE: Even if people come from a broken home, there is some sense that there's marriage. They may not have seen it lived well. And so what's happening to a lot of churches is they're choosing not to engage here because of these scenarios, they don't want to. And so one of our points is to our pastors, especially to single moms who, single moms, divorced or otherwise, are oftentimes the biggest opponent to this form of ministry in a church, if they're there. We know this from just talking to pastors and from my own personal experience. Okay.

And so the way to diffuse that frequently is, you know, you love your children, and you want your children to have the greatest chance to be happy in life. And so we want to in this church, what we want is to create, give your son or daughter the tools so that they can make, they can make good decisions, and increase the likelihood that they can enter into a healthy marriage and have what you so wanted. We want to be able to give to your son or daughter, right, and making it proactive. 

There are real skills that if you learn, like discernment on how to avoid an unhealthy relationship. And then, as a single mom, one of the important things is to learn how to date when you're a single mom and how not to date. Because some of the worst things that happen to children and to the single mom is that they don't, most don't, know how to date in that situation. Right? Like, there's a, you should be very circumspect about when the man that you're dating should be introduced or brought into the life of your child, and it should be at a very late stage, and only when you really think this person is going to is really marriageable. Okay? And you're at that stage where you're discerning it and, short of that, he shouldn't be brought in to your child's life as a single mom, because the man, the person most likely to commit violence against a child is a man living in the house with a child who's not their, who's not his son or daughter. Okay? And so we should be more proactive as a church about teaching the practices of Christian dating in courtship and to certain marital discernment.

REICHARD: I hear some young people may be asking, why get married in the first place? Why even bother? What do you say to them?

DEGANCE: Yeah, there's a great book,The Ring Makes All the Difference, written by Dr. Glenn Stanton, and really unpacks a lot of the great advantage that married couples have and married parents have over cohabiting couples and cohabiting parents. And the reality is marriage is the best path for an individual to say at the end of their life and during their life that they're happy and very happy. 

One of the challenges that cohabitation creates, and oftentimes offers a fake brand or a fake version of marriage, is that when we marry, we are jumping in the boat and we're going off into the water together on life's great adventure. When we cohabitate, we're keeping a foot outside of the boat. Okay? We're not really sure that this person is going to be the person for us, so we keep our foot out, out of the boat, and the boat doesn't go so fast, and it doesn't move so well. And often, if you're going through rough waters and your foot's outside of the boat, you're likely to fall out of it. And long term, if we cohabitate with somebody for a long period of time, and then we break up with that person, and then later marry, and we do all the things that should be the right way to marry, there's a lingering effect on that marriage, that there's evidence that a person who had a long time cohabitation and then later marries somebody else, that the likelihood of divorce in that marriage is as high as other second marriages. And so cohabitation seems to have a long term effect on the skill of commitment 

And the reality is we don't need to be fearful of marriage overall as an institution. There are skills that are known and knowable. Five interpersonal skills that we can learn that you know from communication and conflict resolution shared expectations. There's five, you know, other intrapersonal skill areas. Right? Discernment and appreciation that if we're good at them, okay, we can be good at marriage. 

And then when we're dating, there's things that we can ask ourselves. We should be a student of the other person. When I'm with this person, am I a better version of myself or worse version of myself? And then if I observe how he treats those closest to him, how does he treat his parents? How does he treat his siblings? How does he treat those closest to him? Odds are you will not be treated better than the way that person treats those closest to him over a long enough time frame. 

And so being aware of that, if there's red flags there, get out of the relationship. So those are, you know, be with somebody from a dating perspective for a couple seasons. It's you know, my co-author, Dr. John Van Epp, talks about the best practice of, say, dating somebody—combined between dating and engagement—about two years, going through a process of discernment, seeing how they react in different settings and with their loved ones you're going to more likely be able to enter marriage in a healthy way. If you're being observant of these things that I've told you over a long enough period of time you'll be able to avoid a problematic or unhealthy marriage.

REICHARD: J.P., my final question here. And that is, there’s great opportunity here. So where's the great opportunity for churches today?

DEGANCE: A lot of our newest learnings on this are recent. And I think as parents, I think because as a church, we haven't engaged here. We've just absorbed a lot. We've just absorbed so many of the lessons that the world is sharing without any sort of pushback from the pulpit. And so we just assume these things are true. And oftentimes that gives me a lot of encouragement. You know, 85% of all churches are not spending any money on marriage ministry. And so with marriage being where it is today, and if I were to tell you, we got to where we are, and all the churches are super involved, teaching and talking about marriage, I probably just tell you that we should look for bunkers to purchase somewhere and go ride this thing out. But that's not the case. The reality is the church hasn't been engaged here, and if she gets engaged, there can be a transformation. I truly believe one generation of Christian marriage, well lived, will change the world.

REICHARD: J.P. DeGance, thank you so much.

DEGANCE: Thank you so much, Mary.

REICHARD: You’ve been listening to an extended interview with author J.P. DeGance. Let us know what you think. You can do that by dropping us a line. Just email us at editor@wng.org. That’s editor@wng.org. Also, please subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. It helps to get our content before other people’s ears. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you Monday. Have a great weekend! I’m Mary Reichard.

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