What are the Effects of Marriage and Religion on African Americans in Urban America?
The last three decades have witnessed a “retreat from marriage” in the United States, marked by high rates of nonmarital births, lower rates of marriage, and divorce. Although a growing body of research on the retreat from marriage has focused on its social and economic causes, little attention has been paid to the role that cultural institutions play in furthering or resisting the retreat from marriage. This paper focuses on the role that religious institutions—and the cultural norms and behaviors they promote—play in resisting this retreat among new parents in urban America. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, we find that urban mothers who attend church regularly are significantly more likely to be married at the time of birth compared to urban mothers who do not attend church frequently, and that urban mothers who have a nonmarital birth are significantly more likely to marry within a year of that birth if they attend church frequently.
These religious effects are mediated in part by the relationship-related beliefs and behaviors promoted by churches. Church-going urban mothers express higher levels of normative commitment to the institution of marriage. They also are more likely to benefit from higher levels of supportive behavior (e.g., affection) from the father of their children and lower levels of conflict with the father over sexual fidelity. Thus, by fostering beliefs and behaviors that support matrimony, religious institutions help urban mothers make the transition to marriage in communities where marriage has become increasingly infrequent.
Recently, there has been a huge decline in marriage...
... middle of paper ...
...ay also help explain distinctive class, racial, and ethnic patterns of marriage.
Works Cited
Furstenberg, Frank. 2001. “The Fading Dream: Prospects for Marriage in the Inner City.” In Problem of the Century, edited by E. Anderson and D. Massey. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation
Allison, Paul D. 1995. Survival Analysis using the SAS System: A Practical Guide. Cary, NC: SAS Institute, Inc..
Anderson, Katherine, Don Browning, and Brian Boyer. 2002. Marriage: Just a Piece of Paper? Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Axinn, William G. and Arland Thornton. 2000. “The Transformation in the Meaning of Marriage.” In The Ties that Bind, edited by L. Waite. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.
Thornton, Arland, William G. Axinn, and Daniel H. Hill. 1992. “Reciprocal Effects of Religiosity, Cohabitation, and Marriage.” American Journal of Sociology 98:628-651.
A History of Marriage by Stephanie Coontz speaks of the recent idealization of marriage based solely on love. Coontz doesn’t defame love, but touches on the many profound aspects that have created and bonded marriages through time. While love is still a large aspect Coontz wants us to see that a marriage needs more solid and less fickle aspects than just love.
In Wade F. Horn’s article “Promoting Marriage as a Means of Promoting Fatherhood,” Horn discusses how having a child and being married is better for children because the father is more involved in the child’s life. Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas’s “Unmarried with Children,” on the other hand, takes the reader through Jen’s story about getting pregnant at a young age and deciding not to marry the father of her son. While both sources make appeals to emotion, reason, and character, Edin and Kefalas’s article makes more successful appeals and thus is the stronger argument.
Bumpass LL, Sweet JA, Cherlin A. 1991. The role of cohabitation in declining rates of marriage. Demography 53:913 27
Stephanie Coontz, author of The Evolution of Matrimony: The Changing Social Context of Marriage, writes that there has been more changes in marriage in the past 30 years then there was in the 3,000 years earlier. With these changes there are no religious or cultural exclusions. Coontz claims, “Right here is America’s Bible belt exist some of the highest rates of divorce and unwed motherhood in the country, and born again Christians d...
In today’s society, the notion and belief of growing old, getting married, having kids, and a maintaining of a happy family, seems to be a common value among most people. In Kevin Brockmeier’s short story, “The Ceiling,” Brockmeier implies that marriage is not necessary in our society. In fact, Brockmeier criticizes the belief of marriage in his literary work. Brockmeier reveals that marriage usually leads to or ends in disaster, specifically, all marriages are doomed to fail from the start. Throughout the story, the male protagonist, the husband, becomes more and more separated from his wife. As the tension increases between the protagonist and his wife, Brockmeier symbolizes a failing marriage between the husband and wife as he depicts the ceiling in the sky closing upon the town in which they live, and eventually crushing the town entirely as a whole.
In this study, researchers wanted to know young adults’ views of marriage in the United States. In order to do so, they asked simple questions about marriage and commitment to 424 people ages 21 to 38 from various socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. The results showed that there are two major types of marital constructs, and two major arguments in the debate of marriage’s current state. The two categories of people who think of marriage are called the marriage naturalists and the marriage planners. Both groups of people have nearly opposite views on the idea of what is needed to be able to have a good, healthy marriage. The major arguments about the current state of marriage in the U.S are the marriage decline and the marriage resilience perspectives. These are also polarized, naturally.
Religion has built empires and has torn them down. Religion is everywhere and apart of our everyday life. With so many religions in our society it seems like those who are more religious than others tend to have more children than those who aren’t. Our literature review also states that “ As early as 1960, it was found that Catholic married women wanted and expected to have a larger number of children than non-Catholic married women (Whelpton et al. 1966: 90).” Religion seems to be the main reason on couples deciding to have children.
"New Marriage and Divorce Statistics Released - Barna Group." New Marriage and Divorce Statistics Released - Barna Group. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Apr. 2014.
Ritual and Vows of Christian Marrage and Their Influence on the Differing Ways that Couples Approach Marraige and Marital Breakdown
In the year 1962, a child would have had an 86% chance of having both parents present and living in the home. Many children in today’s generation do not have that privilege. One of the largest shifts in the family structure is the percentage (34%) of children and adolescents living with an unmarried parent. What exactly defines a single-parent household? “A single parent household can be defined as families where a parent lives with dependent children, either alone or in a larger household, without a spouse or partner.” This is an issue that continues to rise progressively each and every year, which in result has become a major concern to social scientists, child psychologists, and public officials across the nation. The effects of adolescents growing up in single-parent homes could be detrimental to their future if it is not handled properly or in a Biblical manner.
Throughout the years, societies view on marriage and cohabitation has been changing, especially from the 1950s up until now. Marriage and cohabitation are in relation to social location, education, immigration and social class. In addition, these changes are influenced through socialization and their surrounding environments as people’s beliefs and expectations vary from what a defined family really is. Same-sex couples are now getting married and the divorce rate is on the rise, including non-married couples raising children. Most importantly, each individual determines who they marry or whom they share their love with through conditioning or in the course of shared similarities. People have dissimilar values, beliefs and attitudes and throughout the life course may change again, including the future generations. This paper reviews why marriage is on the decline and cohabitation is now the accepted social norm, including other aspects such as specific rights that couples have over others in the past. Religion is a powerful tool that alters minds of those who are affiliated with it. As a result, their beliefs are conditioned and marriage is valued differently than those who are not married. All in all this paper will further explain the change, continuity and
“Religious intermarriage as it reflects interaction in an open society is a gauge of changing social structures and norms. The extent to which interfaith marriage is possible and the degree of social and religious institutions' acceptance of interfaith couples indicate the breadth and depth of such changes.”
Recent studies have shown that divorce rates among the United States have steadily increased across demographics which may be contributed by shifts if divorce culture. Marriage culture includes, “the belief, assumption, and practice that marriage is a given and forever,” whereas divorce culture, “is a set of beliefs and practices that define marriage as optional and conditional, with diverse being an option if the marriage does not work.” Additionally, it has been shown that individuals who marry likeminded characteristics, such as those with similar education levels, intelligence, social background, race, and religion are better matches and therefore contribute to marriage success. Other causes to divorce rates have been related to factors
Bridget Burke Ravizza wrote the article, “Selling Ourselves on the Marriage Market” and is an assistant professor of religious studies at St. Norbert College, De Pere, WI. After talking with an unnamed group of college students, she discovers that “These college students have grown up in a society in which nearly half of all marriages end in divorce.” She also reveals “they are fearful that their future marriages will go down that path, and some question whether lifelong commitment can—or should—be made at all.” Furthermore, Ravizza finds that “students are bombarded with messages about sexuality and relationships—indeed messages about themselves—that seem to undermine authentic relationships.” Simply put, culture has accepted divorce as a “normal” thing and has already begun to affect the next generations. The surveyed students are so fearful of divorce, they are, in essence, afraid of marriage as well. They even go to the extreme of avoiding divorce by saying they may not get married at all to prevent the “undermining of an authentic relationship.”
Steinmetz, Suzanne K., and Marvin B. Sussman. "Handbook of Marriage and the Family." Google Books. Springer Science & Business Media, 11 Nov. 2013. Web. 25 Sept. 2015.