chuckd
Puritan Board Junior
I subscribe to Comment Magazine and have enjoyed the in-depth articles. The last issue featured an interview between W. Bradford Wilcox and James K. A. Smith with the title "Marriage is a Social Justice Issue." This portion caught my attention:
JS: Your recent report with [The Urban Institute's Robert] Lerman emphasizes the reasons why policy should be family-friendly. There are good reasons why the state has an interest in encouraging stronger, healthier marriages for the sake of the common good. That sounds exactly right, but I'm guessing that you don't think the primary response on this front is governmental.
BW: What can other sectors of civil society be doing?
JS: And what did we stop doing? If it's actually non-governmental sectors of civil society that are significant here, and we're seeing the problems we are, obviously those sectors have dropped the ball somewhere.
BW: It's important to note that I do think there's a role for government. First, the government needs to stop penalizing marriage. Because of the way our welfare policies are constructed ("means-tested," that is), we end up penalizing people who go from, say, cohabiting or being single to getting married, in terms of what's available to them. That's one issue that needs to be addressed.
Second, public policy can do a better job on the educational front of giving more vocational education or more apprenticeship training to young men who are not on the college track. That's still most men today. It's these guys who are the ones hurting the most, both economically and family-wise.
Third, the government can do a better job in terms of providing more of an economic floor to poor, working class Americans through more generous tax credits to parents with kids, recognizing that the economy has changed. It's a harder arena for working class and poor Americans to navigate, so a more generous child tax credit would go part of the way towards addressing these economic realities.
But yes, at the end of the day, I don't think government is going to be the primary actor in all this. Civic institutions need to do a better job of trying to reach poor and working class Americans with the work that they do, both more generally, but also more particularly when it comes to relationships, courtship, and marriage and family. For instance, on our college campuses we have evangelical groups, we have Catholic groups, we have Mormon groups, and Jewish groups who are doing a lot of good work to bring their young adults into the fold, so to speak. There's no such equivalent effort for young adults in community colleges or those who are not even going to college. Again, these make up a large share of the adult population. Thinking about that is just one example of ways in which we need to reach young adults who are not on the college track with our religious institutions.
