You won’t be surprised to learn that I agree with this quote in a recent Collin Hansen post:
The fabric of the family is unraveling at an alarming rate,” said Chris Brauns, pastor of the Congregational Christian Church in Stillman Valley, Illinois. “Divorce is such a problem in the churches where I have served that if I so chose, I could have more than a full-time job working with couples in the midst of marital crises. Or I could have another full-time position working with children from divorced homes.
The disintegration of the family is alarming. Hansen begins his post on this subject:
Late last year you may have seen the disconcerting report of marriage’s decline in America’s moderately educated middle class. It is no hyperbole to conclude that marriage is disappearing in Middle America. We already knew that the disintegrating nuclear family has resulted in a social crisis among the poor. But this news applies to a much larger swath of America: the 58 percent of adults who earned high-school diplomas but did not attend or finish college. During the 1970s, 73 percent of this group was married to their first spouse. During the 2000s, however, only 45 percent could say the same.
One other troubling statistic stood out: In 1982, 13 percent of children were born out-of-wedlock to moderately educated parents. That number has spiked during the last three decades to 44 percent, according to W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, and Chuck Donovan, senior research fellow in the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation.
As much as I don’t want to believe the grim truth, this dramatic change corresponds to anecdotal observation. The divorce epidemic among my parents’ generation devalued marriage among Generations X and Y. Social stigmas against cohabitation have largely disappeared. The two-parent family appears anachronistic to much of the American middle class.
There is one bright spot in the study, however. . .
Read more here.
The link to read more goes to a google feeder which states “You don’t have permission to view that feed.”
Thanks. I’m an airhead. I think I got it fixed.
Not believing that divorce is a good option…there is still another full time job available for children of parents who “stayed together”, and sent their abused, lost adult children out into the world expecting them to know what marriage is. If a marriage is not “Christ centered”, I don’t see these numbers getting any better. The principal of the rope applies, with one bad generation pulling down the next one. I am not implying that this cannot be reversed. I believe the rope goes both ways, as we are given a chance to pull our children and grandchildren up!