If churches want to promote marriage, they should excommunicate more people.

Conservative Christians, from academic sociologists to NFL kickers, agree that America needs more and better marriages and that we ought to prioritize families and children over mammon. Despite the freakout over Harrison Butker’s viral speech to Catholic university graduates, he was essentially right. It is undeniable that as Americans are increasingly unmarried, childless, and materialistic, they are also increasingly unhappy.

There is no single cause for the vast cultural shifts behind this nor any single solution; churches alone cannot fix these problems, but they do have an essential role. Christian marriages ought to be models of love, faithfulness, and stability amid a despairing, lonely, transitory culture. Too often, they are not.

To change this, church leaders need to understand not only the difficulties that bedevil forming and sustaining strong marriages and families today but also the essential help churches can provide in our culture. This help includes disciplining their members, for culture and community require that standards be enforced.

Being embedded in community helps marriages, and churches can particularly provide trusted webs of relationships that aid men and women in coming together and then staying together. From premarital counseling to an affordable wedding venue to bringing meals after a baby is born, churches should (and often do) provide material, relational, and spiritual support to help marriages survive and thrive. Christian marriage is countercultural, but the model it offers should not be one of isolated couples heroically struggling by themselves, but of networks of families united in community and sharing each other’s joys and burdens.

Churches........

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