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According to government statistics published last week in Britain, marriage is on the rocks: The proportion of unmarried people in the U.K. will exceed that of married people within 25 years, in large part because more men and women will opt to live together without the “bonds” of marriage.

The statistics are sobering.  By imposing formal, legally-recognized rights and obligations, marriage is conducive to stable families (and functional societies) – as well as to the assumption and execution of parental duties.  Certainly the optimal environment for raising children is in a stable family, with both a father and a mother.  

The benefits of a stable, two-parent household aren’t just psychological and emotional.  A study by the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis revealed that child poverty rates are driven primarily by single parent households and dependency on welfare benefits.  Disproportionately, those poor households are headed by single women – because most often it is the single mother who, after bearing the child, is left to undertake all child-rearing responsibilities alone.  Obviously, this phenomenon is more likely where a marriage between the two parents never existed.

Certainly a social safety net that makes it possible (though difficult) for an uneducated single parent to raise children is a necessity – though there’s no denying that it contributes to unwed motherhood by subsidizing it.  But other social forces bear even more responsibility for the erosion of marriage.  And chief among them is feminism. 

Ironically, feminists fulfilled every misogynistic playboy’s fantasy by insisting that women could (and should) enjoy emotion-free sex – without any consequences – just like men.  As a result, too many women have found themselves heartbroken, sexually used – or worse yet, pregnant and abandoned by a man with no legal obligation to support, protect or care for them.  Rather than changing course after confronting the profound consequences for both women and children that resulted from no-strings sex, the feminists instead insisted that women needed neither men nor marriage.

Given the glorification of out-of-wedlock sex that pervades movies, television, magazine and music, it’s hardly surprising that some women bought this feminist fantasy, despite the destruction and heartache that accompanied it.   And others may have decided that it’s simply impossible to compete with “sexually liberated” women for male attention if they insist on marriage as a precondition for sex and/or motherhood. 

Is the U.S. doomed to follow in Britain’s footsteps?  The answer may hang on the health of the only institutionalized, countervailing cultural force that challenges the message and morality of commitment-free sex: Religion.  In a world where religion becomes largely irrelevant, it’s easy to see a wedding as an excuse for a big party, rather than as a sacred, religious event.  And as soon as marriage means nothing more than an opportunity for women to play “queen for a day,” it’s easily dismissed by men and women alike as an unnecessary expense – or even a burden.

Certainly the decline in religiosity is much more pronounced in the U.K. than in the U.S.  A 1999 study of religious life in England concluded that only 8% of the population attended church weekly – and that membership numbers for the Church of England had become so depressed that they were no longer being released.  In contrast, according to a 2002 ABC/Beliefnet poll, fully 38% of Americans reported that they attend church weekly. 

But many of the same social pressure exist in both England and America.  And feminists in both countries have castigated traditional religion as hostile to women.  But ironically, it seems that adherence to the traditional morality embodied in the great Western religions is women’s best shield from the poverty, loneliness and hardship that confronts them (and their children) in a world where marriage has become obsolete.

For the sake of both British and American women and children, perhaps it’s time for all of us to pray for a religious revival – on both sides of the pond.tOR

Columnist Carol Platt Liebau is a political analyst, commentator and tOR / CRO editorial director based in San Marino, CA. Ms. Liebau also served as the first female managing editor of the Harvard Law Review. Her web log can be found at CarolLiebau.blogspot.com

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