Catholic social scientists are doing some of the most important work in the public square making a reasoned case for both state and society to promote marriage and stable two-parent families as important public goods.
I invited three of them — Melissa Kearney, Catherine Pakaluk and Brad Wilcox — onto OSV’s “Catholic in America” podcast to share more about how their recent books draw together mountains of research to make the case for why people should ignore the lies our culture tells us and get married, stay together and have big families.
Faith and Reason
We know by our Catholic faith — and the commonsense borne from plenty of human experience — that the natural family founded on marriage between a man and a woman is the building block of society.
Yet today we are too often having to defend the goodness of both marriage and family life. And we are fighting for every inch in the public arena to ensure family law does not get completely transformed into the government’s solemnization of contractual romantic partnerships that treat children as consumer goods.
It is true that, as Pope Paul VI said, our age requires witnesses rather than teachers. Living the beauty of family life will be the most effective testament to its goodness in law and culture. But we also need to defend the family in words, not just deeds.
Today we live in a culture of empiricist skepticism, meaning that we do not believe that we can know things definitively unless they can be measured using statistics and the modern scientific method. So, to reach people effectively, we must often employ the sciences to make the case for things we know by faith and other forms of reasoning.
Social sciences, in particular, can help us understand more deeply how and when certain phenomena occur when different variables are present, as well as how those phenomena may change or stay the same when the variables are changed.
Fortunately, there are some outstanding Catholics making excellent use of social science in their work as public intellectuals. The secret of their success is that their Catholic worldview helps them formulate the right questions to explore — questions often ignored by others.
What you think you know is wrong
In his book “Get Married,” University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox gathers the evidence together to push back on the cultural myths about marriage, particularly that it is an obstacle to personal happiness. Wilcox highlights how the evidence shows that married people are almost twice as likely to be happy than singles. Other data underscore the benefits of marriage to each spouse, the good news of which is critical in countering the decline in marriage rates that have fallen 60 percent in the last 50 years.
After marriage, couples typically have children. But birth rates are declining, and some married couples are foregoing children altogether, as having children is increasingly seen as inhibiting one’s freedom and fun, not to mention costing a lot of money.
Some women, however, in the face of this “birth dearth,” are braving the occasional rude comments and having five or more kids.
Catherine Pakaluk, an economist at The Catholic University of America, interviewed 55 of these women in her book “Hannah’s Children.” She found that if we want more babies as a society (because we need them for all sorts of practical reasons), then the state has to be supportive of religion and religious subcultures with people who value children as goods in themselves and gifts from God.
Once we have children, we need to help them flourish. Still-prevailing cultural myths describe how child well-being is dependent upon the individual happiness of parents, and that kids are better off after divorce rather than with parents in an unhappy marriage.
But the data shows that kids are not alright. University of Maryland economist Melissa Kearney describes in her book “The Two-Parent Privilege” why children who are raised in stable, two-parent families (particularly with a married mother and father) have a tremendous advantage in life. Child outcomes across a whole range of measures significantly improve, including educational attainment, long-term earning potential. And there is less likelihood of being involved in the criminal justice system.
Professors Wilcox, Pakaluk and Kearney offer us examples of how Catholics can effectively use social science research methods to make the case for the good, the true and the beautiful.
We can be confident that, guided by the wisdom of our faith, we can effectively and fearlessly tread into the sciences in the search for truth. More Catholics doing so will help bring sound reasoning to acrimonious public debates and hopefully generate better public policy.
Jason Adkins is host of a new Our Sunday Visitor podcast called “Catholic in America,” which explores topics related to the missionary imperative of faithful citizenship in our time. You can find “Catholic in America” on the major podcast platforms or visit catholicinamerica.osvpodcasts.com.
