Note: From Get Married (HarperCollins 2024). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
There is no question that religious Americans generally enjoy stronger and more stable families and happier lives, provided that husbands and wives attend together. But why? Part of the story is about what we earlier called “selection effects.” In this case, the kinds of men and women who select into attending religious services today tend to be more educated and affluent, for instance, than was the case in a bygone era, when the rich and poor, the working class and middle class, attended at roughly similar rates. Churchgoers also have the kinds of personality traits – such as conscientiousness – that lead to higher levels of engagement in faith and family.
But selection is not the whole story. Embracing your faith also seems to boost your odds of forging a strong and stable family. There is no community that is more family-friendly than American religion – the churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques across the nation. From a sociological perspective, the norms, networks and nomos found in American religion play an important role in fostering stronger and more stable families among the faithful. French sociologist Emile Durkheim explained that religion furnishes rituals, beliefs and a sense of group identity that deepens people’s connections to the moral order and to one another by endowing both with a sense of sacredness. In his words, the faithful “believe in the existence of a moral power to which they are subject and from which they receive what is best in themselves.” [Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, pp. 226-227] This power, by his account, is realized in and through their participation in a “Church,” which “must be an eminently collective thing.” [p. 44]
In most of the world’s religions, the moral order of which Durkheim speaks is focused to a very great extent on how men and women, boys and girls, conduct themselves toward one another within the family. This is partly because the religious traditions that best succeed in forging strong families are precisely the ones that are much more likely to flourish across time and space. Strong families make for strong faith communities, in other words, which is why the most dominant religious traditions around the world reinforce family life through norms, networks and a nomos that sustains such families.
NORMS. It’s no accident that the normative character of American religion has been deeply tied to values and virtues that prioritize family life. “The ideology of familism,” observed sociologist Peter Berger, has been nurtured and sustained by America’s religious traditions in ways that stress that the “family [is] the crucial social institution, both for the individual and the society as a whole.” [Peter Berger quoted in Kevin Christiano, “Religion and the Family in Modern American Culture,” in Family, Religion, and Social Change in Diverse Societies, p. 47] Sunday after Sunday, familistic values and virtues related to marriage, fidelity, marital permanence, childrearing and domestic life are reinforced in congregations across the United States….
NETWORKS. When Danielle and I left the hospital on a cold November day in 2009 with twin newborns, we were overwhelmed. We had a bunch of children waiting for us at home, but we were already exhausted, adjusting to the physical demands of caring for not one but two newborns. Sleep, energy and good cheer were in short supply at that moment in our lives (especially for me, as I noted earlier).
But this season was made easier by the care and concern of our Catholic and evangelical Protestant friends. They organized a meal sign-up and delivered dinners, Monday through Friday, for a full month. And they crowded around the twins at church, saying, “What beautiful babies.” Their meals, visits and words of encouragement made this big transition less strenuous. Their presence in our lives further made it clear that we were not alone in facing this big new challenge. This gave us a measure of comfort as we transitioned from the massive demands of raising five children to the full-on seven-kid adventure we had in store….
NOMOS. The death of a loved one. The loss of a job. The trauma arising from caring for a daughter afflicted by bipolar disorder. What Hamlet called the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” come for almost all of us one day.
But men and women who identify with what Berger called a “nomos” – a meaningful sense of the cosmos, a belief that God or some supernatural force superintends the world – are better able to handle the arrows when they hit home. Those who can fall back upon a “fundamental order in terms of which the individual can ‘make sense’ of his life and recognize his own identity” are better able to handle stress and suffering. [Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy, p. 22] That’s in part because most faiths have prayers, rituals, and teachings that make sense of the difficult and dark moments of our lives. In Berger’s formulation, they cast “sacred canopies” over our lives that make sense of death, of suffering and of evil that we confront in our daily lives.
This is important for family men and women. That’s because stress often acts like a cancer in our family relationships….A religious nomos also endows family roles with a sacred significance that fosters bigger investments in family life….Finally, the norms, networks and nomos associated with faith also foster an orientation toward the future among religious adherents that encourages them to steer clear of short-term thinking and impulsive actions that harm relationships.
Brad Wilcox, professor of sociology and director of the National Marriage Project, University of Virginia
