Denying Reality on Marriage

Hypergamy is here to stay, the religious gender gap, gray divorce and more in this week's digest.

If you are still shopping for Christmas gifts for a man in your life, check out my Christmas gift guide for me.

What I’ve been reading: The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

Speaking of novels, every year my wife reads all the books on the long list of nominees for the Booker Prize. She noted this year that multiple books made Biblical references or allusions. Despite secularization, and a public that increasing doesn’t know much of the Bible, it is still a bigger influence on arts and literature than you might think. Another example, the very title of the new opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones that was performed by the Met Opera in 2021 is taken from the book of Jeremiah.

The Religious Gender Gap

Ryan Burge has been on the leading edge of documenting the phenomenon of young men becoming more religious than young women. He just took a deeper dive into that. One of his conclusions is that this seems to be a primarily Catholic phenomenon.

He writes:

We can see a gap for evangelicals: women are about three percentage points more likely to say they are evangelical Protestants compared to men of the same age. For mainliners, the gender gap isn’t statistically significant. Notably, though, women aged 18-40 are twice as likely to identify as evangelical compared to non-evangelical Protestant. But the Catholic gender gap is there and it’s reversed. Young men are two percentage points more likely to be Catholic than women of the same age.

…

For Catholics, where we saw the largest religious gender gap in the previous analysis, politics seems to be a factor. Young male Catholics are significantly more right-leaning than female Catholics. In the whole sample, 38% of men are Republicans compared to 32% of women. Among white Catholics, the gap narrows: 42% of young female Catholics are Republicans compared to 45% of men. There’s still a gap, though.

For non-white Catholics, there’s a clear Democratic preference: 62% of young female Catholics of color are Democrats, and just 20% align with the GOP. For men, it’s 55% Democrats and 27% Republicans. There’s some tacit evidence here for the JD Vance pathway to Catholicism that intersects with politics.

Click over to read the whole thing.

This piece from the academic scholar of American conservatism George Hawley is also relevant: Will Religion Replace Race as the New Identity Politics?

Gray Divorce and Holidays

The Wall Street Journal ran an interesting piece about how gray divorce - divorce by people over the age of 50 - is complicating longstanding Thanksgiving traditions. The same of course would apply to other holidays like Christmas.

Mackenzie Thompson struggles with Thanksgiving following her parents’ divorce last year after 43 years of marriage. She’s trying to figure out how to handle the holiday, which she often celebrated with them. She considered having dinner with just her husband and four children, but worried her parents would be lonely. Now Thompson, an only child, thinks she’ll invite both and let them decide whether to come. “It will be out of my hands,” says the 42-year-old in Cincinnati. “I will have done the fair thing and invited both of them.”

Note the impact of this choice for divorce on adult children and grandchildren. It’s actually making their daughter feel bad when it’s the divorcing parents who ought to be feeling guilty.

People in my grandparents’ Greatest Generation don’t seem to have divorced that much. So even if your parents split up, your grandparents were probably still together. But now that we’re into Boomer and Gen X territory for the grandparent bracket, divorce among these older adults is a reality.

Nearly 40% of people divorcing are 50 and older, up from 27% in 2010, according to researchers at the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University, in Ohio. That’s an estimated 710,000 gray divorces compared with 640,000 in 2010. Researchers based their analysis on the 2022 American Community Survey, the latest data available. The rise is even steeper among those 65 and older, where the number of people divorcing has increased about 65% since 2010.

It’s amazing how much pain and discomfort parents are willing to impose on their children in the pursuit of selfish choices. Divorce creates permanent logistical and inter-personal challenges for the children, something that especially comes to the fore during holiday seasons. Some additional examples from the story:

While divorce is hard for any family during holidays, it can be especially jarring after long marriages when expectations, traditions and roles have built over decades. Highly anticipated rituals of kids’ tables, after-dinner walks, and storytelling about heirloom recipes can come to an end. Some adult children celebrate Thanksgiving on Thursday with one parent and Saturday with another. Others try to eat two feasts in one day, gulping turkey and pie at Dad’s before going to Mom’s with hopefully enough room for more. Other adult kids assume their parents’ role as host, welcoming everyone who can get along….“Thanksgiving was a really big holiday for us,” she says. “I don’t think it will be easy.”

…

D. Scott Sibley, 43, his wife and four children often flew to Utah from their home in Illinois for a big family gathering with their parents at Thanksgiving. That ended when his parents divorced in 2015 after 39 years of marriage. “There’s a lot of loss, not just of marriage, but of tradition,” says Sibley, an associate professor of family sciences at Northern Illinois University.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Feminist Rejecting Reality

Playwrights Sarah Bernstein penned an interesting op-ed in the NYT, calling for the male breadwinner norm to be rejected in order to restart the dating and marriage markets.

She views the increasing conflict between the genders as resulting from the collision between the male breadwinner norm and women’s superior economic outcomes in today’s marketplace.

Hundreds of years after the Brothers Grimm published their version of that classic rags-to-riches story [Cinderella], our cultural narratives still reflect the idea that a woman’s status can be elevated by marrying a more successful man — and a man’s diminished by pairing with a more successful woman. Now that women are pulling ahead, the fairy tale has become increasingly unattainable. This development is causing both men and women to backslide to old gender stereotypes and creating a hostile division between them that provides fuel for the exploding manosphere.

And:

Cinderella may now have her own castle — single women are also exceeding single men in rates of homeownership — but she is unlikely to be scouring the village for a hot housekeeper with a certain shoe size. A 2016 study in The Journal of Marriage and Family suggests that even when economic pressure to marry up is lower, cultural pressure to do so goes nowhere. A recent paper from economists at the St. Louis Federal Reserve found that since the 1960s, when women’s educational attainment and work force participation first began to surge, Americans’ preference for marrying someone of equal or greater education and income has grown significantly.

This is an example of an interesting development. Hypergamy, the preference of women to marry up or at a minimum not marry down, is now openly acknowledged and discussed in mainstream media. A decade ago, it was mostly the manosphere who talked about such things. In fact, hypergamy was one of its core concepts and one of the things men often learned about there. Today, it’s everywhere. This is an example were a plank of manosphere thinking has actually crossed over and gone mainstream.

The church still doesn’t talk about hypergamy much. Because it has profound implications for how the sexes relate to each other, this renders much of the church’s take on marriage flawed. That’s one reason I wrote about hypergamy myself in back in 2018.

Newsletter #23: Marrying Up

So far so good for Bernstein. But her proposed solution is wishful thinking. She wants to get rid of the male breadwinner norm in our society.

The male breadwinner norm has become a kind of cultural anchor that keeps us going around in circles, returning again and again to the gender dynamics we have tried to leave behind.

…

Letting go of the male breadwinner norm is not an instant fix for our culture, but we can’t move forward without that step. After all, breadwinner is not only a limiting identity; it’s also a relative one. If we don’t release men from the expectation, any plan to help them regain lost ground will have to also ensure that women never catch up. [emphasis added]

Here’s where I myself would add some nuance. Money is only one of the factors that goes into male attraction. There are other ways for men to generate attraction, and other ways for women to marry up apart from money. Think power and status, confidence and charisma, looks and style.

For example, the idea of a woman preferring cool and interesting starving artist over the stable but boring midlevel banker is almost a trope. (I wrote a brief piece about one such example of this in Katy’s Perry’s “The One Who Got Away” video).

While money is important, I do think there are ways for men to come across as high status and desirable to women without necessarily making a lot of it.

But it doesn’t seem very likely that we’ll be ending hypergamy anytime soon. Women are not going to go for it. Saying that we should abandon the male breadwinner norm is to say that women should be content to marry down. I don’t think they are going to go for that. Indeed, we don’t even see it in the most highly gender egalitarian societies like the Nordics, where women still prefer marrying a man of higher income and sex role division in professions is pervasive.

UK Assisted Suicide Law

The UK just passed a Canadian style assisted suicide law, one that will permit the very same abuses we’ve seen north of the border. It’s interesting to see that former Prime Minister Gordon Brown came out against it, talking about the experience of losing his own child.

Jennifer, the baby daughter my wife Sarah brought into the world a few days after Christmas 2001, died after only 11 days. By day four, when the extent of her brain haemorrhage had been diagnosed, we were fully aware that all hope was gone and that she had no chance of survival. We could only sit with her, hold her tiny hand and be there for her as life ebbed away. She died in our arms. But those days we spent with her remain among the most precious days of my and Sarah’s lives. The experience of sitting with a fatally ill baby girl did not convince me of the case for assisted dying; it convinced me of the value and imperative of good end-of-life care.

It was pretty wild how the campaign to get the law passed marketed it. Here’s an ad that supposedly ran in the London underground.

The Implications of Demographic Decline

A woman on X posted about her friend’s experience of demographic decline in Japan:

I’m in Tokyo speaking to a new friend who lived in Montreal for the past 20 years but is just returning to Japan now for a dream job. I asked her what the demographic collapse feels like from Japan:

“In Tokyo, you hardly feel it at all. Everything is more or less the same. But in the countryside like in Kyushu where my parents live, it’s like everything good you’ve ever valued is being destroyed. Every famous store or ramen shop, gone forever. The countryside now feels alienating.”

Decline leads to concentration in the metropole. We’re actually seeing this play out in the US already. It will also affect churches, as I wrote about recently.

What Happens to Churches When Population Falls

Best of the Web

WSJ: Buy the House First, Get Married Later: Couples’ New Math

Joel Carini: Is the Evangelical Church Guilty of Marriage Idolatry? - Includes a mention of Yours Truly

Samuel James: 11 Theses on Instagram and the Modern Woman

AP: Australia is banning social media for people under 16

Mere Orthodoxy: Navigating Reenchantment

Financial Times: Relocation nation: the Americans moving to more politically aligned states

Just south of Nashville, Williamson County is a well-to-do enclave, one of the 10 richest counties in the US; actress Nicole Kidman and her husband, musician Keith Urban, once owned a 35-acre ranch there. For almost 14 years, 46-year-old Ashley Williams has also called it home; but she expects to move soon. “Someone I know threw a massive party with cardboard cutouts of Trump, McDonald’s fries and Trump wine,” the marketing consultant says. “I wasn’t invited.” Sixty-five per cent of the county’s voters cast their ballot for the president-elect in November; Williams wasn’t one of them. Now, “my neighbours are sore winners,” she says. The Chicago native is planning a move out of state; her partner’s job was set to transfer him to Switzerland soon, but Williams is keen to switch up her living situation much more quickly, mostly citing concerns about local support for policies such as Tennessee’s near-total ban on abortion.

New Content and Media Mentions

You may have noticed my new graphics that I’ve been rolling out. Thanks to Beck and Stone for the new designs.

I got a mention in Real Clear Books, Religion Unplugged, and World magazine. And I was also a guest on the New St. Andrews College podcast, and the More Christ podcast.

New from me in the last two weeks:

• The Four American Conservative Aesthetic Styles - Retro-Americana, techno-futurist, neofascist, and MAGA. This one got a lot of play.

• How the Decline of Evangelicalism Helped Elect Donald Trump - My latest in American Compass.

• My guest on the podcast this week was Ryan Williams, president of the Claremont Institute.

• My podcast last week was with Bob Woodson on how evangelicals should think about race.

• And Nathan Pinkoski contributed a guest essay on What Christians Can Learn from Postmodernism. Sheluyang Peng looked at similar things in his essay in the latest American Affairs magazine.

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