An interview with Don S. Browning Putting Marriage on the Agenda Again Broadly respected among US professionals and academics for its ecumenical and interreligious focus is the Lilly Project on Religion, Culture, and Family. The Project addresses the contemporary situation of American families from a range of historical, legal, theological, and cultural perspectives and claims that religious traditions have valuable ethical and institutional resources to help revitalize marriage and family life. The INTAMS review's editor Thomas Knieps-Port le Roi talked with Don S. Browning, Alexander Campbell Professor Emeritus of Ethics and the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago Divinity School and current Project Director. The family seems to be a topic of wide concern in the US, even among policy makers. How did the issue get on the political agenda? It first got on the political agenda when the Republican party – Richard Nixon first of all, then Ronald Reagan – began to realize that this was an issue. I am not denying that they really might have been concerned with the topic, but they also realized that they could make inroads to certain parts of the voting population if they appealed to those issues. So they addressed the topic as part of what they called the "Republican Southern Strategy" to win over the South from the Democratic party, in which they were absolutely successful. So from Nixon through Reagan to the present, the South, which used to be solidly Democratic, has now become solidly Republican. So, for presidents, Republican governors for the most part, Republican senators, and congressmen there is a double source of motivation – both an honest concern coupled with religious sensibilities and an agenda for political purposes. So, it is mainly the political and religious conservatives who are interested in the topic? Well, there is some common ground here. First of all, everybody is concerned about children. That includes political conservatives as well as political liberals, religious conservatives and religious liberals alike. They may vary in their images of what a family is, but almost all politicians, whether they are liberals or conservatives, Democrats or Republicans, have to pretty much show a pro-family stance before the American public, and maybe even – roughly speaking – a pro-marriage stance. Hilary Clinton wrote It Takes a Village to Raise a Child (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). So here is a Democrat acknowledging that it takes a village to support a family and that it takes a family to support a child. She did not really come out with a strong pro-marriage statement, but she got very close. At the same time Bill Clinton was getting what they called TANF (Temporary Aid to Needy Families) to reform the welfare system. That welfare reform was very much designed to enhance marriage and the two-parent couple. Clinton is a Democrat and he got the Democratic party to do this, actually stealing Republican ideas in the process of repackaging them. So the Democrats under Bill Clinton were leading the progressive elements in American politics toward a more central stand on family and marriage issues. Of course, there were questions about his personal behavior, but then politically he said much the right thing from the standpoint of the voting public. So there has been a lot of concern about family values, and politicians have learned to come to terms with this concern. Increasingly the churches will have to come to terms with it, too. It is quite clear that churches who have a more active pro-family and pro-marriage stance are doing better at attracting people and at growing than the churches that don't. Before we come to the churches, what is the position of the human and social sciences regarding the family topic? The interesting thing is that the family debate became far more complex in the late '80s and '90s, when the social sciences began to do large-scale studies on family change. The social sciences in the US are almost completely politically liberal. 95% of sociologists and psychologists adhere to the Democratic party. Then new information came up saying that family changes are not going as well as we had thought. The social science predictions from Talcott Parsons to the present had supposed that the new family forms would be able to perform and assume pretty much the same functions as they did in former times. However, the social sciences began to realize that single parents are having some difficulty, that step-families are having major difficulties, and that children may have some kind of unprecedented difficulties as well. So the liberal social sciences began to come up with data which surprised them and turned out to be more complex than expected. So, in fact you have a complex interaction between religion, politics, and the social sciences. However, one gets the impression that the whole debate has become increasingly polarized between those who see the current developments as sign of decline and those who believe these recent changes have ultimately improved the quality of family life… The social sciences are always divided when it comes to interpreting their data in the context of a broader philosophical or political stance. But there is more consensus, almost necessarily so, as to what the facts are, because the facts increasingly are confirming each other from different studies based on larger and more sophisticated samples. It all depends on whether people are suffering from family changes or whether their wealth and their education makes it possible for them to undergo these changes and endure some of the blows. There is for instance evidence that children of divorced parents or children born in non-marital relationships do have more difficulty in schoolwork or in getting employment or in their own sexual lives, and they are more inclined to have children out of wedlock. There is a strong claim that young men who get in trouble with the law are far more likely to come from a broken home. We also know without a shadow of a doubt that teenage births and divorce contribute to poverty, especially for women and children of divorce. Even if there are welfare and other types of support, the situation is seldom as good as for people who are in a marriage with two incomes. There is a general public health issue involved here and that is also a public cost issue. All these things are part of the picture, and much of that has been seen by the social sciences. There are large data sets, which mean that conclusions tend to have a little more power and more force. Although there is an increasing interest in family issues in most European countries as well, politicians and scholars in Europe might be more reluctant to advocate marriage, which most of them would regard as a strictly private lifestyle option… It used to be regarded as a private life choice in the US as well. But here you have a good illustration of how the social sciences may contribute to a changed perception. There is for instance growing evidence in the US that there is more violence and more sexual abuse in cohabiting families than in married families. Confronted with these statistics, which may appear very offensive for many a scholar, some sociologists have started to ask "what are the mechanisms that are at stake here, why would there be more violence in a cohabiting family than in a family with a public marriage?". Then they have come up with an analysis, arguing for example that public marriage brings the larger community into the household situation, that the grandparents are likely to be more involved if the couple is married, that there are more people looking over the couple's shoulders, inhibiting the use of violent behavior, etc. Likewise, when people get married they tend to handle their finances differently. Married people often hold joint bank accounts whereas people that are not married often have separate bank accounts, as if they are already poised to leave and have their money with them. So there are all kinds of subtle little differences you begin to see between the two types of living arrangements. Frequently, people who are cohabiting have never talked about whether or not they even want to have children. They haven't talked about a whole range of things that do in fact happen. Who chooses the furniture, who will take care of the children once they are born, who will educate them? Married people are just a little bit more likely to have talked about those things and, therefore, there is a stipulative factor connected with it. You are saying that there is a growing awareness of the institutional advantages that characterize marriage over against other living arrangements? The thing that really convinced me to take the public and institutional aspect of marriage seriously was reading the economic analysis of marriage and family that came from the Chicago School of Economics. These were my colleagues at the University of Chicago, like Gary Becker, who got a Nobel prize for writing a book on the family. These people provided an unbelievably interesting analysis, although their approach was very reductive in economic terms. However, they understood that marriage in many ways is like driving an automobile – with big benefits, but also with big risks! In the Protestant Reformation Luther and Calvin said marriage is first of all a civic good under the control of the city government. It's like public education and like clean water. What I think is so interesting is to see that the idea of the institutional and civic aspect of marriage and the high risks and the high benefits aspects of marriage has been lost for many people. Marriage has become a private thing; it's like holding hands. Now there should be many things about marriage that are private but it is not necessarily a private institution. And I think we are beginning to see what happens in societies when that particular set of meanings about marriage and family begins to be too dominant. Various economic and social science analysts rightly recommend looking at that again. So in the US family debate the interest has been shifted from the family toward marriage? That is what happened to the Religion, Culture, and Family Project. We talked about families a lot for several years, before we started to talk about marriage. That is what also happened to other liberal groups, like the Institute for American Values which has been so influential on the American family debate. They eventually brought marriage back into the picture, which was not to be expected, especially for people coming from liberal religious and political circles. I think they realized that in all modern societies, sooner or later the partners have to pick up the pieces when a family falls apart. They have got to figure out who does get the property, who does have responsibility for the children, who is responsible for the violence that may occur. Increasingly you have a silent spread of family law throughout all modern societies to handle the contingencies of family break-up, even if the partners have not been married. If a cohabiting couple, that has been together for a couple of years and has had a child in the meantime, breaks up, the partners suddenly realize that there is this huge legal apparatus in place. And they never consented to it; in fact they thought they were avoiding it but it is there. They were not even aware of it; they had cohabited to escape the law, but the law was there – and is increasingly there – nonetheless. When in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries canon law made mutual consent the defining characteristic of marriage, the good thing about it was that it broke the power of families to give their daughters away for political and economic purposes. What we are doing in modern societies is that we are eliminating consent. You are being treated increasingly as if you were married anyway even if you are not. A marriage-like situation has been defined outside of your will and outside of your consent. However, marriage as such does not prevent families falling apart. So why not focus then primarily on encouraging and supporting stable partner relations – whatever forms they may take – instead of insisting on that "piece of paper"? That would probably be a good thing to do. But think about these proactive words you use: "we are going to encourage", "we are going to support", etc. All those are typical interventions that you assume certain types of institutions like church and state might make. But you do not mention marriage because marriage might entail a consent that would include the spouses' will and their intentionality about what they are actually trying to do, and enhance their reflectiveness about their own goals and their own aims. So it seems rather strange: we are going to somehow or other help them, but we are never going to actually raise the question "what is it that you intend to do? What are you doing to safeguard your own life and that of your children in front of different parts of the community?". I like Calvin's understanding of the marital covenant. For him, the marital covenant was not just between the couple. It included God of course, it included a covenant with extended family, it included a covenant with the witnesses, it included a covenant with the state, and it included an implicit covenant with whatever children might come from the union. So a marriage entailed multiple covenants because there were these multiple relationships which sooner or later were going to be involved. I think it is not a bad idea to educate people early in life to understand, to reclaim, and to fill up what marriage and family means. We should do this so that they begin to understand more its complexity, its responsibilities, and its multiple "covenants". If you want stability, if this is what you really value, you are probably going to get back to the same old game of promoting marriage – good marriage – from the beginning. We are undeniably facing important transformations in the social function of marriage, for instance that conjugal and parental roles no longer coincide in the individual's life course. Some might argue that stable relationships only matter if and as long as children are involved… Marriage has to do with the integration of a variety of goods. It has to do with the integration of desire, affection, actual sexual exchange, and there is a high degree of probability that it will lead to children – even in the age of contraception. We have to integrate those goods with the actual process of raising a child and not just the physical raising of a child, but the moral-spiritual raising of a child of which we know by now that it takes a long time in modern society. Those of us who are parents know we are still involved in our children's lives well into their twenties and thirties. There is hardly anybody I know who has not somehow financially contributed to their children in their thirties, to help them buy a house, pay their school debts, etc. That does not stand as just an isolated act, but an act of a married couple who are affectionate with one another, who are depending upon one another, who are sexually involved with each other, who actually go through the childbirth process together and who reinforce each other on that long, arduous task of actually bringing up the child. That is what marriages are about. So basically, I would say for people who want to be involved, who want to integrate sexuality and affection, marriage probably should come into the picture, because children are very likely to come along as well, sooner or later. We talked already about cohabitation as a threat to marriage. What about the demand of gays and lesbians for legal recognition of their unions? Marriage is basically an interpersonal relationship of a sexual kind. In the understanding of gay marriage it becomes a kind of sexual friendship, and so that large integrational model of what marriage is tends to be lost except for the many privileges and supports, especially public supports that have accrued to marriage in the late modern era. Now the contradiction involved in gay marriage is that we want those protections and benefits but we want them for a much more narrowly-defined institution, basically around sexual friendships of a long-term character. And we want to call it marriage because of its social legitimation. I think that stretches and shifts the definition of marriage, and that shift translates into social shifts that are already at stake. So there you increasingly get people looking at marriage as "pure relationship" (to use a phrase from the British sociologist Anthony Giddens) – no obligation pertaining to children, no obligations pertaining to finances, no obligations pertaining to longevity, just pure affectionate soul mates and a sexual relationship. There are strong social forces going in that direction for heterosexuals, and you might say that gay marriage is just another version of that same idea that calls the pure relationship marriage. I tend to think that on both sides this trend needs to be resisted a bit and we need to have a fuller, a larger integrational model of marriage like the one Augustine and Thomas Aquinas had in mind when they talked about the goods of marriage. They listed a variety of goods and said they all can be brought together in this marital institution. I am not saying that gays and lesbians should not have protection but I am saying that it is probably not a good idea to reduce and narrow the definition and understanding of marriage to accomplish this. It has to do with shifting the understanding of marriage. And when we get up to the level of law, it becomes a principle that has great symbolic and cultural power. So all of those are the reasons why I would be cautious about that. What should be done to convert people to that broad integrational model of marriage? We should not just say: get married, we should say that there is a lot to get ready for, that there should be a lot of preparation and thought, even far more than 6 months before the wedding. I think it is partly because we have a hard time putting marriage in the context of a life course, we have a hard time thinking about our lives as life courses, and we have a hard time thinking about our lives as vocations. We tend to think about our lives in terms of jobs, or in terms of finance – in terms of a series of short-term satisfactions. We know now for instance that children cost an enormous amount of money and you would think that they might bankrupt a couple, and they do almost. On the whole, all the research demonstrates that married people end up having a lot more money by the time they are sixty or seventy years old than singles. Why? It is because they tend to organize their economic vocations into a long-term plan and make certain decisions which actually add up over the period of time to greater degrees of wealth. Now there is controversy about what produces that. But it appears that people integrate their economic lives into long-term plans, and so they can develop a kind of overall vocation, maybe even a spirituality of a kind, where their economic activity is integrated with all these other goods and values. Furthermore, I think we need to do a huge amount of reconstructive work of a historical, philosophical, religious, and legal kind to help people understand what marriage is. I am not in favor of multiplying marriage legislation. Marriage legislation is a good thing, but what is needed in addition is a cultural work – a cultural work with regard to marriage which entails historical and philosophical reconstruction. I do believe that there have been great accomplishments historically with regard to marriage. For instance, we need to understand and appreciate why we don't have polygamy in the West. Why has consent been defined as the essence of marriage? We should understand what those accomplishments are about and retrieve and reconstruct them. That has been the primary purpose of the Religion, Culture, and Family Project of which you have been the director and which has produced several valuable publications. There you have coined the term "critical familism"; which type of family and of marriage do you intend to retrieve and to reconstruct? Some people that I associate with would use the word "familism" all by itself. A new "familism" means a new way of valuing families, valuing marriage, valuing children, making all of those things more central to a modern and technological society. I felt very uncomfortable with the word "familism", even "new familism" all by itself. So I put the word critical and to some extent I wanted to communicate that something like a moment of critique, coming from European critical theory and the critical social sciences, was part of what I meant by the new familism. It is critical in the sense that I tried to isolate the problems and the power sources in modern societies which undercut families and more specifically which undercut the possibility of the equal-regard marriage. This includes a critique of patriarchy and of overly-determined role specificity as to what a man does and to what a woman does. Now, what is "equal-regard marriage"? Equal-regard marriage is based on a Christian principle that makes it possible for the husband and wife to have equal access to, equal privileges in, and equal responsibilities for participation in the public world, the wage economy, politics, and domestic obligations. It doesn't mean wife and husband have to be identical in their roles. It means that they in principle are free to work out their roles in an equal way depending upon their natural inclinations, their talents, their various concerns, their various pursuits. They may not be identical but they can negotiate that equality. Now there are a lot of resistances and a lot of obstacles to realizing the equal-regard marriage, not the least of which are the overwhelming demands placed on families today from the work world. It sounds wonderful for everybody to be able to go out and get a job and for men and women alike to have access to the wage economy – until you realize that it puts entire families under the power and control of the demands of the work world. So you have many couples who are away from the home between 90 and 100 hours a week in the wage economy. They don't have time for each other, for the children, for their love life, to participate in the community life – they are working all the time. So, we think that critical familism needs to be a critique of the spread of technical rationality that comes into modern society and which absorbs everybody into the wage economy. Relationship equality will appear to many as a typical achievement of modern thinking. Why do you refer to the Christian tradition in retrieving "equal-regard marriage"? Well, because I think that equal-regard ethics, which is part of my argument, needs a self-sacrificial moment. And it needs the grace that I think is required to energize and support the self-sacrificial moment. Now you notice, I said "self-sacrificial moment", I am not saying love is completely and totally about self-sacrifice. It has to be equal regard. But equal regard does not stand on its own two feet and it does not renew itself on its own two feet. So the Christian contribution is significantly around the renewing quality of self-sacrificial love, about going the second mile and about forgiveness. That trilogy of grace, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice is a unique contribution of Christianity. And my point of view is that indeed those elements were part of Christian marriage. I think also that the seeds of the equal-regard concept can be found in early Christianity. I do not consider Christianity the exclusive source for the equal-regard family, but what is unique is the energizing empowerment of equal regard under strain and under sin. The New Testament demonstrates that Roman and Greek understandings of marriage were all really firmly embedded in the urban centers of the Palestinian world when Jesus and Paul came along and what they were saying was interacting dialectically with this social and cultural setting. So, you cannot understand the New Testament's understanding of marriage without reading the Aristotelian and Socratic tradition. But the question is, what is the twist that Christianity added to a broader human wisdom and understanding of what marriage was that sometimes comes from non-Christian sources? What are your current thoughts about the ways cross-cultural and interreligious dialogue can enrich our Western understanding of marriage? It has to do with the question of retrieval and reconstruction and making sure that religions are not marginalized in any society from the public discussion on marriage and the family. Otherwise, it would be just so easy for people to think you move from the social sciences, law, and economics to public policy about marriage. Our entire argument is that law, social sciences, and economics have a relevance but that the religious traditions also do. And increasingly in complex societies, even in a place like the US, it cannot be just the Christian tradition. Christianity has a lot to contribute, and I am particularly interested in that as a Christian, but increasingly Jews, Muslims, and other religious groups have got to be part of the picture. Because they have been the big storehouses in the past of wisdom about what this institution of marriage is, they have something to contribute. I think they have plenty to contribute, but it takes some time to retrieve more solid, more well-grounded, and more rationally communicable ideas. The religious groups need to do their own work and they need to talk to each other, and they need to talk to social sciences, law, and economics. They need to be part of the public discussion.