Covenant Marriage: The Movement to Reclaim Tradition in America 9780813546490

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Covenant Marriage

Covenant Marriage The Movement to Reclaim Tradition in America

Y Steven L. Nock Laura Ann Sanchez James D. Wright

Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nock, Steven L. Covenant marriage : the movement to reclaim tradition in America / Steven L. Nock, Laura Ann Sanchez, James D. Wright. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8135-4325-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 978–0–8135–4326–0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Marriage law—Louisiana. 2. Law reform—Louisiana. I. Sanchez, Laura Ann, 1963– II. Wright, James D. III. Title. KFL95.N63 2008 346.76301'6–dc22 2007037879 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2008 by Steven L. Nock, Laura Ann Sanchez, and James D. Wright All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our Web site: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America

Steven L. Nock (1950–2008)

The senior author of this volume, Steven L. Nock, passed away on January 20, 2008, two months shy of his 58th birthday. Steve was a wonderful collaborator and a dear friend to us both, a prominent scholar of the American family, a devoted husband to his beloved wife Daphne Spain, a talented musician and singer, an active member of his many communities, and a person who loved life and lived it to its fullest. The three of us began this covenant marriage project in 1997 and the ten years we worked with Steve was a gift. Our lives and our profession are diminished by his passing. Laura A. Sanchez Bowling Green, Ohio James D. Wright Orlando, Florida January 24, 2008

Contents

List of Tables ix Preface and Acknowledgments

xi

1 Covenant Marriage and the Marriage Movement

1

2 Covenant Marriage in Louisiana:

Legal and Historical Background

21

3 The Implementation of Covenant Marriage

in Louisiana

40

4 Who Wants a Covenant Marriage?

62

5 The Role of Religion in Covenant and

Standard Marriages

78

With Jill A. Deines

6 The Ongoing Marriage

98

7 Divorce, Religiosity, and Counseling

116

8 Conclusion

141

Appendix A 153 Appendix B 161 Appendix C 169 Appendix D 173 References 179 Index 187 About the Authors 000 vii

Tables

4.1 5.1 5.2 6.1 6.2 7.1 7.2

Comparisons of Covenant and Standard Marriages Affiliation, Religious Participation, Religiosity, and Spirituality of Select Covenant and Standard Couples Religious Attitudes About Marriage and Divorce Factors That Influence the Quality of Marriage and Thoughts of Divorce What the Future Holds Cox Regression Models, Covenant Effects on Marital Disruption Rates Cox Regression Models, Premarital and Marital Counseling Effects on Marital Disruption Rates

ix

64 80 82 104 106 118 120

Preface and Acknowledgments

We were just as surprised as everyone else when, in 1997, Louisiana enacted the most sweeping marriage and divorce reform of the twentieth century. But interest in, and concern about, trends in marriage rates, unwed births, divorce, and cohabitation had been growing rapidly since the late 1960s. Social scientists were not alone in their interest in the significant changes in households and families that were underway. Politicians and policy makers also became concerned that changes in marriage and living arrangements were influencing economic well-being and the larger social climate. Members of the clergy also began to exhort their congregations to restore the family values of the past. Not everyone agreed about what the high rates of divorce, unwed births, or cohabitation meant, but no one could deny the trends. Growing numbers suspected that, left unchecked, the retreat from marriage might threaten the social and economic health of the nation. In the span of a decade or two, the decline of the family and of traditional family values had become widely cited reasons for many problems in America. While many communities, congregations, and states experimented with efforts to turn the tide, Louisiana revised its entire marriage and divorce law by creating two forms of matrimony. Henceforth, couples wishing to marry in Louisiana would be required to pick between the standard form of marriage as it then existed in the state, and a new form called covenant marriage. In short order, Arizona and Arkansas enacted very similar laws. Many other states debated doing so, or are still debating. The differences between these two forms of marriage are mainly in the requirements for entry and exit. Those seeking a covenant marriage are required to obtain premarital counseling on the serious nature of marriage xi

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Preface and Acknowledgments

and the lifetime commitment it implies. Then, once married, covenant couples who experience problems in their marriage are required to obtain assistance or counseling to remedy those issues (in short, to make every good faith effort to salvage the marriage). Couples choosing the covenant must sign a Declaration of Intent stating that they have disclosed all information to their future spouse that might threaten the marriage. And those who would seek divorce from a covenant marriage must either prove fault in a traditional sense (adultery, abandonment, physical or sexual abuse, commitment to prison at hard labor or death) or live separate and apart for two years. There are no counseling requirements for a standard (non-covenant) marriage, nor are there any requirements about seeking counseling when problems arise. And a no-fault divorce from a standard marriage can be obtained by living separate and apart for six months. Pundits quickly began referring to the two forms of marriage as “marriage” and “marriage lite,” the implication being that any couple who was truly serious about marriage as a lifetime commitment would opt immediately for the more restrictive covenant arrangement. As sociologists with interests in family change, we immediately recognized this natural experiment as an ideal testing ground for many ideas and proposed policies floating around at the time. What, if any, are the effects of premarital counseling? Do stricter divorce laws lead to fewer divorces? Does marriage counseling increase the odds of reconciliation? And most obviously, what type of person is attracted to this more demanding form of marriage? The book that follows is our attempt to answer these and related questions. This project took eight years to complete—a year of planning and preparation, five years of data collection, and two years of analysis and writing once all the data were in hand. During that time, we were blessed by help from many people. We mention them here because they played vital roles in bringing this project to completion. Katherine Spaht, the author of the covenant marriage law and professor of law at Louisiana State University, was generous with her time and assistance throughout. On many occasions, we needed clarification of some legal issue that she was able to resolve. At other times, she made it possible for us to meet with individuals who played central roles in the state government. Our advisory panel offered important guidance in the design and execution of the project. We thank Margaret Brinig of Notre Dame University, Alan Hawkins and Thomas Holman of Brigham Young University,

Preface and Acknowledgments

xiii

Lynn White of the University of Nebraska, James Sweet of the University of Wisconsin, and Katherine Spaht. Tony Perkins, the sponsor of the bill (and then in his second year as state legislator), was generous with his time and resources. He spent an entire day with the senior author and provided needed materials in the early stages of the project. The University of Virginia was very generous to our project. The vice-provost for research was able to secure additional support for us when an error was made in the initial mailing of questionnaires. The College of Arts and Sciences provided additional support to Rutgers University Press to augment marketing and development of the book. The Office of Sponsored Programs provided assistance with managing the entire project, but especially the challenges of administering subcontracts. To Kobby Hoffman and Gayla Goerge in the Office of Research Support in the College of Arts and Sciences, we owe special thanks for assistance with the many proposals, amendments, and budgets required in a project of this sort. To Brenda Tekin, fiscal administrator in the sociology department, we are eternally grateful for patience and guidance. Tulane University generously provided additional office space for the sample recruitment to our panel study. At Bowling Green State University, Cynthia Price and Robin Euler of the Office of Sponsored Programs provided invaluable help with subcontract details, always with an eye to advancing our primary data-collection efforts. We also thank the Bowling Green State University Center for Family and Demographic Research, which liberally provided concrete resources and expert staff to assist this research project. Wendy Manning, director of the Center for Family and Demographic Research, was tireless in her support of our research effort that came to be called the Marriage Matters research project. The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Smith Richardson Foundation (SRF) provided primary support for this project. Both organizations were helpful throughout and we are thankful to the individuals who assisted us with financial and technical issues, especially Pat White at NSF and Phoebe Cottingham at SRF. At the University of Virginia, we were fortunate to have two excellent assistants who oversaw the daily operations of gathering information from over 1,300 individuals repeatedly over the course of five years. Dr. Julia C. Wilson, now assistant professor of sociology at Emory and Henry University, served as principal research assistant. She was responsible for organizing and programming all aspects of data collection and storage. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on the topic. We are deeply grateful for the

xiv

Preface and Acknowledgments

care and creativity she showed daily. We are also grateful for her sense of humor when things went wrong. Mrs. Phyllis Taylor was our office manager for the entire project. She entered all the data from the questionnaires. She answered the many calls that came to us on our toll-free phone number. She developed a filing system that served us well throughout the project. We are grateful for her diligence, care, and patience. Over the years, we had close to seventy undergraduate students working on this multifaceted project and a small cadre of talented, ambitious graduate students. Each of these students merits note, but we would like to mention a few for their key efforts. At Tulane University, Wendy Cunningham and Karen Fitzgerald were pivotal in the design of a lively, active research lab, responsible for overseeing a large group of undergraduates who were finding and recruiting our sample and coordinating the implementation studies. At Tulane University, Claudia Dierkes and Jennifer Martinez worked tirelessly on bringing the implementation studies to fruition with complete interviews and high response rates. During the later waves of our panel study, at Bowling Green State University, Chynna and Nicole Fifer were indispensable for their roles in maintaining our sample by periodically conducting telephone interviews and address checks, and recruiting respondents for the qualitative face-to-face interviews. In the last months of data collection, Trisha Strait, Theresa Trout and Ashley Webb oversaw a lab of undergraduates engaged in the hard work of reducing attrition, conducting telephone interviews, and transcribing interviews. Several wonderful graduate students facilitated this enormous datacollection effort and the research disseminated to conferences and journals from this project. At Tulane University, Jessica Pardee and Marcel Ionescu were eclectic and creative researchers in their efforts to design and implement the various focus-group, implementation, and confederate-couple studies. Also at Tulane University, Krista Brumley and Petrice Sams-Abiodun conducted our early focus-group studies, and Petrice served as an interviewer and contact person to Black churches promoting covenant marriage. At Bowling Green State University, Jill Deines spearheaded a multitude of research efforts, including sample retention efforts, survey design, telephone interviewing, and face-to-face interviewing. Eric Jorrey, Elizabeth Baker, Stacey Brumbaugh, and Kristy Krivickas also worked on data-collection or analysis efforts, which helped refine our conceptualizations of the core questions surrounding covenant marriage. This collaborative effort over the years has been a great experience. Our work with these young talented scholars has been invigorating and intellectually satisfying.

Preface and Acknowledgments

xv

We consider ourselves fortunate to have had the guidance and help we received from Rutgers University Press. Adi Hovav offered significant and helpful substantive guidance throughout. Marilyn Campbell helped us prepare the manuscript and showed us how to deal with the challenges of electronic documents. To both, we offer sincere thanks. Finally, our extraordinary editors, Nicholas Taylor and Barbara Ray, made hundreds of comments and changes to the original manuscript. We accepted almost every change each suggested. What better endorsement of an editor can there be?

Covenant Marriage

Chapter 1

Covenant Marriage and the Marriage Movement

Y Earlier in this century, divorce was rare and carried a burdensome stigma. For children, divorce brought the shame of a “broken home,” and for adults, the suspicion of infidelity and moral failure. Back then, marriage for most was for better or for worse, “until death do us part.” By the 1980s and 1990s, this social landscape had changed. Divorce had become commonplace; in fact, it was so routine that more marriages were ending in divorce than in death or widowhood (Bongaarts and Watkins 1996). The relatively new idea of equality between men and women was increasingly reflected in everyday routines. Unmarried childbearing, once disgraceful, spread to the wider culture, crossing race and class lines. Traditional marriage had been seemingly rejected, moving from a core institution of society to yet one more lifestyle choice among a growing array of alternative family arrangements. Some argued that marriage itself, once the basis of the family and therefore of social life as a whole, had become little more than “a piece of paper” for many Americans. As concern over the social costs of divorce and the deinstitutionalization of marriage increased, so too did the backlash against new family norms. This was seen at all levels: private, state, and federal. Efforts to strengthen or promote marriage were advanced beginning in the mid-1990s as part of an emerging “marriage movement” that we discuss later in this chapter. The 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) attracted widespread attention by defining marriage as a union of one man and one woman. Since then, a wide range of legislative, judicial, and ballot initiatives have focused on gay marriage. All signify the resistance to changing the traditional definition of marriage.

1

2

Covenant Marriage

Congress passed significant reforms to the welfare system in 1996 as well. As we will explain, that legislation, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), specifically mentioned the growth in unmarried births and the decline in marriage as causes of social problems and dangers to the country (Nock 2005). PRWORA set the stage for federal and state experimentation in marriage promotion by providing the rationale and funding possibilities. Prior to the election of President George W. Bush in 2000, however, the only explicit marriage promotion was at the state level. The first comprehensive pro-marriage initiative was Louisiana’s “covenant marriage” law, the subject of this book, enacted in August 1997. This was an unprecedented reform in domestic-relations law. It requires that every couple desiring to marry (first in Louisiana and now in Arizona and Arkansas) choose between the conventional type of marriage (“standard marriage”) and a more demanding type that is marginally harder to enter and significantly harder to leave. Never before in Western history have ordinary individuals had a choice between alternative marriage regimes. And never before in the twentieth century had a state amended its domestic relations laws so significantly by offering a form of marriage that was much harder to terminate with divorce. What has been the effect of covenant marriage on those who chose it? Are covenant marriages happier or more stable than standard marriages? What has been the effect of covenant marriage on the wider culture? Has it begun to counter what some call our “divorce culture”? With the support of the National Science Foundation and a private foundation, we set out in 1998 to answer these questions by undertaking a study with both program implementation and evaluation components and a five-year longitudinal panel survey of a group of newly formed marriages. Covenant marriage embodies practically all components of the diverse and growing American initiatives to strengthen and promote marriage. The law is intended to promote dialogue between engaged partners about the seriousness and permanence of marriage. Engaged couples are required to disclose any information that might jeopardize a subsequent marriage. The law mandates premarital counseling for all couples. The partners are required to make good-faith efforts (including counseling) to resolve any serious problems. The law imposes much stricter requirements for divorce (the traditional fault grounds, or lengthy separation). Lawmakers intended to bring community actors (including clergy and counselors) into common purpose to support a more traditional type of marriage. In

Covenant Marriage and the Marriage Movement

3

vision and law, covenant marriage was designed to re-institutionalize and reinvigorate marriage. Our study provides a systematic evaluation of this family-law reform. We began with a survey of general public attitudes, which explored people’s concerns about changes in marriage and divorce, their views about whether and how divorce harms society, and their opinions about specific family policies. We conducted focus groups with relevant political constituencies. We launched an implementation study in the first months after the law’s passage. We sent assistants posing as engaged couples to clerks of court offices around Louisiana to apply for marriage licenses to see how effectively they were implementing the law. We conducted intensive interviews with lay and religious officiaries to see how they counseled covenant and standard couples, and to hear their views on the covenant marriage law. With quantitative and qualitative data, we studied newlywed couples during the first five to seven years of their marriages, gathering information about their courtship, weddings, and early days of marriage, intimacy, and strains. We studied how these covenant and standard couples changed over time as they experienced their first marital joys and hurdles. In short, we conducted a comprehensive and grounded review of this social experiment. Our results demonstrate the challenges and successes of social policy in changing demographic trends such as marriage, fertility, and divorce rates. Several features of this family-policy initiative are most prominent and are likely important influences on our findings. First, in the most tangible policy-relevant ways, covenant marriage was not well implemented. The clerks of court regularly subverted the requirements of the law, and the state did little to advertise it. Fewer than one-half of the residents of Louisiana who responded to our statewide survey had ever heard of covenant marriage one year after it was passed. Although as many as 10 percent of newly married standard spouses told us that they would have preferred a covenant marriage had they known of it, only approximately 2 percent of all new marriages each year were registered as such. Further, despite widespread interest in the policy by lawmakers in many other states, only two (Arizona and Arkansas) have adopted covenant marriage. The second important component of the new domestic landscape in Louisiana is the striking difference between those who selected covenant marriage and those who chose standard marriages. Most obviously, covenant couples are much more religious than most couples who enter standard marriages. Before marriage, they talk more about their marital prospects, discuss spousal roles and expectations more intensively, have less conflicted

4

Covenant Marriage

courtships and greater family support, and universally undergo premarital counseling. Finally, covenant couples are less concerned about the legal and policy aspects than they are about the symbolic importance of what a covenant marriage implies. Throughout our study, whether in focus groups, in surveys, during interviews, or in handwritten notes and e-mails to the investigators, covenant couples often spoke openly about their belief in covenant marriage as a signal. They understand marriage to be sacred and see it serving God’s plan. In their roles as husbands and wives, they understand themselves to be part of that plan. Therefore, they see their choice of covenant marriage as sending a signal to others about the proper purpose of matrimony. While we initially intended to evaluate the consequences of a family-law reform and its premarital and marital-counseling components, we soon realized that we were also in a position to explore how a subgroup in society (those who elect covenant marriage) was able to use a law as a powerful symbol of marital commitment, integrity, and faith. Later chapters describe in great detail covenant marriage and those who are attracted to it, but first it is necessary to put this legal innovation in context, to flesh out the points made in these opening paragraphs and provide the larger social, legal, and political context in which covenant marriage emerged.

Family Trends as Social Indicators Just as miners took canaries into the mines to warn them of the presence of poisonous gas, the family is a telling harbinger of coming changes in social life. Indeed, when people alter their household and family arrangements in large and conspicuous ways, it is a sure sign that society as a whole has changed. Consider some of the well-known changes in household and family arrangements that characterized the last century. First, households became more diverse. In 1910, 80 percent of all households were maintained by married couples. By 1998, only 53 percent were, and by 2006, this fraction had declined to 51 percent (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2006, table H1). The number of households headed by single mothers, single individuals, and cohabiting couples increased significantly (Caplow, Hicks, and Wattenberg 2001, 81). Even single-father families increased greatly in the latter twentieth century (Eggebeen, Snyder, and Manning 1996). Fewer than 5 percent of adults born between 1928 and 1932 cohabited before age twenty-five. By 2000, a majority of young adults

Covenant Marriage and the Marriage Movement

5

cohabited prior to marriage (Cherlin 1992; Bianchi and Casper 2000; Bumpass and Lu 2000). Second, the percentage of women who worked for pay increased from 20 percent in 1900 to 59 percent in 2000. Today about 71 percent of all mothers, and 78 percent of mothers of school-aged children, are in the labor force (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2005, tables 6, 7; Spain and Bianchi 1996). Third, the marriage rate itself has declined. Between 1970 and 1997, entry into first marriage fell from 93 to 49 per 1,000 unmarried women aged fifteen to forty-four (Casper and Bianchi 2002, 24; National Center for Health Statistics 1995, 1999, table 1; Spain and Bianchi 1996). Most of this decline is because people are marrying later. The median age at first marriage fell from 22 for women and 26 for men at the beginning of the century to 20.1 and 22.5, respectively, at the height of the baby boom in 1956. The age at first marriage then rose steadily to its present (2006) levels of 25.3 and 27.1 for women and men, respectively (U. S. Bureau of the Census 2006; Casper and Bianchi 2002). The postponement of marriage means that people spend more of their lives unmarried. Even though the vast majority (90 percent) of Americans still marries at some point, they do so later in life and continue to divorce at high rates. Finally, divorce rates increased significantly during the twentieth century, though they had been rising since the mid-1800s. About one in ten marriages formed in 1900 ended in divorce (Cherlin 1992). Beginning in the mid-1960s and continuing through the 1970s, divorce rates rose at historically rapid rates. The rise ceased in 1982 and divorce rates have declined modestly since. Demographers now estimate that 43 percent of all fi rst marriages begun in 1995 will end in divorce or separation (within fifteen years) (Bramlett and Mosher 2002, table 21). As the fraction of marriages ending in divorce rose, so did the percentage of children living with one parent. Increases in unmarried births also produced more single-mother families. In 1965, 8 percent of all children lived with their mother only. In 2000, 22 percent did (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2001). These trends reflect enormous social, legal, and economic changes— growing equality between men and women, the development of effective birth control, the legalization of abortion, increasing individualism, increasing tolerance for diverse lifestyles, higher levels of education, liberalized laws governing divorce, and a steady shift from a national manufacturing to a global information economy. Together, these demographic trends and their causes reveal the declining significance of marriage as an organizing principle of life for adults and children (Cherlin 2004).

6

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A Brief History of Changes in the American Family How and why did these remarkable social and demographic trends occur? At one time, marriage organized public and domestic life, childbearing, child rearing, and pretty much all the other features of adult existence. Today, marriage is seen by many as more of a personal choice about lifestyles. Behaviors and norms that were once seen as necessarily united have been increasingly disconnected. How did marriage, gradually but inexorably, become “uncoupled” from our domestic existence? An answer to this question is necessary if we are to grasp the significance of the covenant marriage experiment and the larger movement it represents. The centrality of marriage in American culture and law during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be understood, in part, as a consequence of poorly controlled fertility (or better, ineffective methods of birth control) (Nock 2000; Hertog 2000). So long as sexual intercourse almost inevitably resulted in births, marriage (or engagement) was the only permissible avenue to sexual fulfillment. Marriage, in short, was the institutional and societal arrangement that allocated responsibility for children, an essential social function. No alternative civil or religious arrangement could accomplish that task except in extraordinary circumstances (for example, orphanages, poorhouses, homes for unwed mothers, and the like, all created in part to step in when the institution of marriage failed). By restricting sex to married partners, communities from biblical times forward were able to reduce births of children for whom no male kin was obviously and legitimately responsible. More marriages meant fewer dependent waifs and, therefore, a more orderly society. To reinforce the lesson, children born outside marriage were denied certain legal rights, among them inheritances and claims on paternal assets. These children, and their mothers, were stigmatized in the eyes of the community. Once effective contraception uncoupled sex from fertility, the social justification and need for marriage became less evident. The very effective and easy-to-use birth control pill was introduced in 1960, and that year can thus be treated as the “beginning of the end” of many conventional sexual standards and, for our purposes, marriage norms as well. Within a decade, more than one-third of all married women in America were using oral contraception. A decade later, the figure was six in ten (Westoff and Ryder 1977). These technological innovations in birth control were a “contraceptive revolution” or a “reproductive technology shock” because of their

Covenant Marriage and the Marriage Movement

7

profound implications for social customs and norms. With premarital pregnancy and its stigma no longer a risk of unmarried sex, the convention of “shotgun” weddings gradually but steadily declined (Akerlof et al. 1996; D’Emilio and Freedman 1998). In short, the contraceptive revolution made sex a private matter, legally and essentially removed from state control. Thus, effective contraception and, later, legal abortion suddenly made marriage unnecessary for sexual relations. A series of Supreme Court decisions during the 1960s had major implications for the legal and cultural meanings of sex and childbearing, among them Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965); Eisenstadt v Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972); and Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973). In Griswold, the court declared unconstitutional a state law forbidding the use of contraceptive devices, even by married couples. Writing for the court majority, Justice William O. Douglas explained that various guarantees of the Bill of Rights create zones of privacy and, as a result, prohibiting the use of contraceptives “is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship” (360). Griswold and subsequent court decisions established a constitutional right to privacy in matters of sexual behavior among consenting adults, married or single, and most recently heterosexual or homosexual (Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 538 [2003]). Before Griswold, sexual matters had never been completely private because of their potential public consequences; adultery and illegitimacy disrupted family lines, sometimes creating collective obligations for the care of offspring. Sexual intercourse had long been the legal and symbolic core of marriage. A marriage without intercourse could be deemed void (potentially nonbinding), long the main grounds for annulment within the Catholic faith. Likewise, sexual exclusivity was the basis for a range of legal restrictions surrounding marriage. Adultery, for example, provided grounds for lawsuits by the aggrieved spouse. A married person’s consortium, the legally protected emotional stakes spouses have in their marriages, was protected in family law. Those who damaged a marriage by adultery or by luring a married partner into an extramarital relationship (enticement) were potentially subject to legal action by the aggrieved partner. That these sorts of arrangements now strike us as curious or even anachronistic is a testament to how dramatically our views of domestic relations have changed in the last half century. Similarly, the rapid spread of no-fault divorce laws since 1970 has effectively eliminated adultery as a legal condition for divorce. Culturally, once sex became a private decision

8

Covenant Marriage

unrelated to marriage, so did reproduction. Marriage, sex, and procreation, once so intimately bound up in our very understanding of domestic life, were no longer related in the same way. And if sex and procreation could now be independent of marriage, then the fundamental rationale for marriage as a social institution dissipated. The pace of change was rapid. In 1970, barely one in four unmarried nineteen-year-old women had had intercourse. Two decades later, the figure was 72 percent (Laumann et al. 1994). Among Americans (both genders) born between 1963 and 1972, only one in ten was still a virgin at age twenty. Attitudes changed as well. In 1972, about half (47 percent) of adult Americans thought it was “always wrong” or “almost always wrong” if a man and a woman had sex before marriage. By 2000, the disapproving minority had dwindled to 28 percent (Davis and Smith 2004). Rising rates of cohabitation also signal cultural changes in the meaning of domestic life. In 1970, the U.S. census estimated there were 520,000 unmarried heterosexual couples living together. By 1998, the number stood at 4.2 million. About half of the cohabiters have never been married, and only one in four of these relationships included two persons under age twenty-five (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1999). In short, large and growing numbers of older and previously married people were now cohabiting. Undoubtedly, cohabitation is a prelude to marriage for most people. But it has also become an alternative to marriage for a growing segment of the population. Another consequential change is that the social stigma and legal consequences of having an illegitimate child have almost vanished. In a series of decisions between 1968 and 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the legal distinctions associated with the marital status of a child’s parents. The marital status of parents is now legally irrelevant from the perspective of either parents or children. In short, the ability to control fertility has meant that parenthood and marriage are less institutionalized and much less predictably connected than ever before. Combined with a growing cultural emphasis on individualism and freedom, rising opportunities for women (and men) outside of marriage, and increasing acceptance of diverse lifestyles, it is easy to recognize that a once near-universal script governing domestic relationships—chastity, dating, engagement, marriage, sex, and children, pretty much in that order—has given way to an expanding range of acceptable, though less traditional, life-course options. Big social changes always foster a sense of disorientation, awe, hope, and fear. The family trends just summarized are no exception. Traditionalists

Covenant Marriage and the Marriage Movement

9

feared that the sky was falling. Progressives hailed the dawn of a new age of liberation. Most people were, and remain, confused.

The Call for a Revival of Tradition Rather than burden the reader with a comprehensive review of all the scientific literature on the effects of marriage for men and women, let us instead craft a reasonable summary of what we now know: (1) There is fairly convincing evidence that getting married causes people to change in positive ways. (2) Children do best when reared in a married-couple household. (3) Marriage is associated with higher earnings for men and lower poverty rates for families. (4) There is also little question that other types of relationships (for example, cohabitation) do not confer the same benefits for either adults or children. Adults and children appear to thrive in stable married-couple families, even if they are not always happy. No feasible alternative comes close in its economic or emotional benefits for children or adults (Nock 2005, for a summary). For these reasons, then, many family researchers and policy makers argue that even in the modern era, many good reasons exist to prefer marriage over other intimate relationships. And therein lies the rub. How can couples achieve “stable married-couple” status and all the apparent advantages that accrue given the social changes we have discussed in this chapter? In all honesty, nobody really knows. However, there is no shortage of commentators, critics, scholars, researchers, and activists who think they know and who are eager to implement their preferred solutions into the public policy debate. Chief among them, at least for our purposes here, are those who believe that the answer is to restore marriage to its once central role and honored status in adult life. If one accepts the premise that marriage is indeed “the best foundation,” then it is obviously in the interests of policy makers to promote it. The solution becomes promoting traditional marriage and family values. Grounded in this view, the federal and state governments have been experimenting since the mid-1990s with programs to do exactly that. Policy makers and private interest groups want to support and encourage marriage because they believe that marriage lowers poverty rates and reduces the number of people on welfare; discourage divorce because divorce increases the poverty of women and inflicts psychological and social damage on children; and promote childbirth within marriage because two adults can bring more financial and emotional resources to the rearing

10

Covenant Marriage

of children than just one. Increasingly, the question is not whether these would be worthwhile goals to pursue, but whether there is any realistic way for policy to intervene in the private affairs of individuals.

Covenant Marriage and the “Marriage Movement” We see, finally, what covenant marriage has to do with all the social and political changes discussed in this chapter. Beginning roughly with the advent of effective contraception in the 1960s and continuing through the nationwide wave of no-fault divorce laws in the 1970s and 1980s, the general drift was toward increasingly lenient rules for divorce, more divorces, and more casual attitudes about the necessity of marriage for sex or childbearing. Evidence of and concern for the downside of these trends have stimulated a reaction and a wide variety of pro-marriage, anti-divorce reforms (mainly at the state level). One of the more prominent and much discussed of these reforms has been covenant marriage, especially as enacted in Louisiana. The concept of a covenant marriage is noteworthy mainly because much of twentieth-century family-law reform has attempted to liberalize provisions for divorce. Covenant marriage is one of the fi rst steps in the opposite direction. The no-fault divorce concept rested on an assumption that the misery of poor marriages and the costs of prolonged, difficult divorces could be lessened by access to easier, less-punitive grounds and procedures for divorce. The assumption behind covenant marriage is that the miseries of marital dissolution can be lessened or avoided altogether by helping couples better understand the full implications of getting married, encouraging them to take their marriage vows more seriously, and by making divorce more difficult to obtain. As we see in the next chapter, this is exactly what Louisiana’s legislation meant to accomplish. In fact, covenant marriage is thus perhaps the most conspicuous (but by no means the only) example of a larger movement that arose in the 1990s in response to the various developments reviewed above, a trend often called the marriage movement. This movement has produced books, articles, workshops, and conferences, spawned numerous institutes, think tanks, and Web sites, and wrought significant changes in federal and state policies. In all its manifestations, the marriage movement intends to promote and strengthen marriages, reduce divorce, curb childbearing outside of marriage, discourage cohabitation, and bolster marriage as an honorable, desirable status. The movement draws its strength from diverse sources,

Covenant Marriage and the Marriage Movement

11

including religious leaders, elected officials, social scientists, and public intellectuals. Despite occasional internecine disputes about rationale, justification, or proposed solutions, movement advocates are united in the idea that marriage is a public institution, not solely a private relationship. What does it mean that marriage is a public institution? It means that marriage is (or better, should be) important to society at large, not just to the spouses and children who reside inside a particular marriage. Movement activists believe that marriage should occupy a central place in society and in the lives of its members. They envision the marital relationship as an important connection between individuals and their broader community. From marriage, family; and from family, a principal mode of being in the community and larger social world. Accordingly, those seeking to strengthen marriage call for a variety of public initiatives, both secular and religious: changes in state domestic relations laws (such as reenactment of fault grounds as a route to divorce, restrictions on unilateral no-fault divorce, covenant marriage), public policies (such as marriage and family-education curricula in high schools), community marriage-promotion programs (whether faith based or secular), educational and counseling programs (provided to those contemplating marriage, to new spouses or parents, and to couples seeking divorce), even public-service announcements on television and radio. That the movement is a force to be reckoned with is evident in the enactment in various places of all these initiatives (Institute for American Values 2000; Ooms, Bouchet, and Parke, 2004). The idea that others, especially governments, have a legitimate role in issues of marriage and domestic life now seems controversial, but only because we have become so adamant in our belief that marriage is and should be a private matter. This intensely privatized vision of marriage is, in fact, a quite recent social and legal development. Governments and communities have long been involved in setting terms and conditions of marital life (Cott 2000). The main difference between earlier times and today is that in the past the state’s main concern was in restricting who could marry and under what terms (and likewise, how marriages could be dissolved and under what terms), whereas today, the state’s interest is increasingly one of strengthening and promoting marriage as one solution to a wide range of personal and public ills (Nock 2005). In certain respects, today’s marriage movement is surprising and perhaps even superfluous. After all, most Americans still value marriage and the overwhelming majority marry sooner or later (Bramlett and

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Mosher 2002). Indeed, American marriage rates are among the highest in the Western world, and the divorce rate has been slowly falling since the 1980s. What, one might ask, is the problem for which a marriage movement is the solution? The problem is that the institution of marriage has undergone dramatic transformations. All the rapid demographic and social changes that we reviewed have disrupted traditional marriage and family patterns. In many respects, the current debate about marriage as framed by the marriage movement represents a collective effort to make sense of these profound changes. It is a reaction against those trends, a denial that marriage is just about the private lives of married couples, and an affirmation of a larger public interest in promoting marriage, restricting divorce, and discouraging intimate relationships that depart from marriage. Politics, Religion, and the Origins of the Marriage Movement The marriage movement draws on a diverse and loosely knit group of individuals and organizations. Many are in religious communities, especially conservative Protestant denominations. Their aim, as we have said, is to rebuild a traditional model of lifelong monogamous marriage. Others, practitioners and professionals in various fields, are motivated by concerns about the economic consequence of rising divorce rates for states, or about the welfare of couples, individual adults, and children. Many are therapy oriented and seek to educate or counsel people about strategies and skills to build a healthy relationship, whether marital or otherwise. Others belong to fatherhood groups concerned about absent fathers. Still others are state government officials concerned about the problems of the poor (and the costs of those problems). Most of these latter individuals are affiliated with programs that target unmarried parents, many of which spring from changes in welfare laws (“welfare reform”) in the mid-1990s. What binds them is a general belief that the transformation of American households and families from the late 1960s through the late 1980s weakened an important foundation of society. Seen from the perspective of earlier decades, especially mid-twentieth century, it is not hard to understand why many see things this way (Cherlin 1992). The baby boom era following World War II was one of the most homogeneous and idealized cultural periods of U.S. history in matters of marriage and living arrangements. The postwar decades featured historically high fertility, low divorce rates, and youthful ages at marriage. The postwar economy and veterans’ programs significantly expanded the middle class.

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Attendance at religious services was high. Culturally, the 1950s and early 1960s were also the most “familistic” decade of the century: the family was understood as the crucial social institution, both for the individual and for society as a whole. In 1950s-era America, the ideology of familism found expression in popular television shows such as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, and Leave It to Beaver. In the American mainstream of the time, at least as depicted in Hollywood, dads wore suits and ties to the office, moms stayed home in pretty dresses and starched aprons, and every childhood naughtiness was immediately regretted and atoned. That none of this was quite true, of course, doesn’t matter. It is the symbolism of the 1950s family that is important, not the reality (Coontz 2005). Against this backdrop, the political and cultural trends of the 1960s and 1970s raised concerns among conservative religious communities, who saw them as signs of moral and cultural decay. Youth culture, antiwar protest, feminism, the sexual revolution, legalized abortion, divorce, cohabitation, homosexuality, and open challenges to authority energized the rise of a religiously affiliated movement, what came to be called the New Christian Right, to restore the basic features of 1950s familism and religious conservatism. The New Christian Right included such groups as Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, Beverly LaHaye’s Concerned Women for America, James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, Jerry Regier’s Family Research Council (now headed by Tony Perkins, the sponsor of covenant marriage legislation in Louisiana), and dozens of others. It quickly became a powerful political force, mobilizing millions of voters and establishing lobbying groups with close ties to Republican leaders and conservative members of Congress. The advent of Christian mass media and its leaders (such as Pat Robertson, Jay Sekulow, and Ed Vitagliano) certainly increased the visibility and influence of the movement. More generally, conservative Protestantism has been and remains an important force in matters of the family because its adherents are very active, devoting more time and money to their churches and affiliated organizations than any other major religious group in America (Smith 1998; Wuthnow 1988). Increased sexual freedoms drove many of the liberalizing trends of the latter twentieth century, so it is not surprising that sexual matters were the focus of much of the New Christian Right reaction. As Karen Armstrong notes in her historical review, the fundamentalists of the 1970s and 1980s “associated the integrity and even the survival of their society with

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the traditional position of women” (2000, 312). Opposition to feminism, homosexuality, and abortion were (and remain) central themes in the religious movement to restore family values (Armstrong 2000; Weaver 2000). Others who became involved in the marriage movement were professionals, practitioners, and social scientists motivated not by their religious views but their interests in divorce and marital stability. Psychologists have analyzed interpersonal behaviors and strategies associated with various relationship outcomes and have identified styles of conflict resolution, coping, and communication as critical elements in marriage. Demographers and sociologists have identified background traits such as cohabitation, parental divorce, young age at marriage, and unstable employment as predictors of divorce. These and other disciplines produced a large, if not seamless, body of evidence on the benefits of marriage and the costs of divorce that has been used in targeted ways to support the general thrust of the marriage movement. About twenty-five years ago, a field now known as couples education or marriage education also began integrating social science research into therapeutic approaches to helping couples prepare for or prevent problems in relationships. Couples education, offered in class-like settings, teaches both individuals and couples strategies to avoid the known risks to marriages. Yet another group of professionals launched programs to promote and help fathers. Fatherhood programs, many sponsored by state governments, focus on pregnancy prevention (most target young men), child-support enforcement and paternity establishment, visitation issues, and services for poor fathers, especially those unable to comply with child-support orders. Professionals in these fields contributed actively to the marriage movement. Several independent professionals, national professional organizations, and educational and research institutions have launched efforts on behalf of marriage that also promote the goals of the marriage movement. Academic centers at universities and at well-funded think tanks such as the Brookings Institution, the Urban Institute, and the Heritage Foundation produce analyses of and take positions on issues related to marriage. And marriage therapists, religious leaders, and think-tank intellectuals have launched community marriage initiatives, typically in couple-to-couple formats that target entire communities. In the mid-1980s, journalist Michael McManus began promoting a faith-based project called Marriage Savers, which involved couple-to-couple mentoring organized through religious congregations. Diane Sollee, a marriage and family therapist who coined the term “marriage education,” founded the Coalition for Marriage, Family,

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and Couples Education in 1995. She sponsors a national clearinghouse for marriage information, an annual national conference called Smart Marriages, and maintains Web sites and Listservs to provide additional information. The Center for Law and Social Policy, which maintains a section on families and couples, publishes policy-related materials and maintains a Web site with links to such information. The Institute for American Values maintains a Council on Families that sponsors conferences, publishes original research, and reviews public policy relating to marriage. A Summary of Marriage Movement Policies and Programs Policy analyst Theodora Ooms and her colleagues (2004) have traced the origins of public-policy efforts to promote and strengthen marriage to the late 1980s, when evidence documenting the adverse effects on children of growing up in single-parent homes began to accumulate. State efforts focused initially on making divorce more difficult, and subsequently on marriage and couples education programs. The following is a brief summary of the most conspicuous efforts. With the election of President George W. Bush in 2000, federal funding to support marriage promotion programs grew. The Healthy Marriage Initiative within the Administration for Children and Families (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2006) supports many such projects. Examples include programs for unwed parents that emphasize the importance of marriages for their children, promoting the establishment of paternity, and strengthening marital and co-parenting relationships with nonresident fathers. Some develop and test curricula and training programs to help welfare staff address issues of marriage and family formation. The emphasis of the Healthy Marriage Initiative is to help couples “who chose marriage for themselves” create a strong and healthy marriage rather than simply promoting marriage per se (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2006). The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 (passed February 8, 2006) provides $150 million each year until 2011 for healthymarriage promotion and fatherhood programs (no more than $50 million is to be spent yearly on fatherhood programs). To date (2007), the Administration for Children and Families has allocated almost all of this amount to a wide range of programs and services throughout the country. All are focused on marriage education, pre-marriage education, marriage skills, divorce reduction, high school education on the value of marriage, marriage mentoring, and programs to reduce disincentives to marry in means-tested aid programs (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2006).

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The range of state marriage efforts is impressive by any standard. Every state has done something to encourage marriage, reduce divorce, or strengthen two-parent families. In the past decade, ten states have introduced policy initiatives such as high-level commissions, media campaigns, proclamations, or conferences, or implemented laws and policies to establish and fund programs to strengthen marriage and reduce divorce. Many states have also made changes in their marriage and divorce laws, including incentives for couples to prepare for marriage with counseling or education. Five states offer reduced fees for marriage licenses to couples who use such services. Three states have enacted covenant marriage laws, and another twenty state legislatures have debated such legislation. Likewise, many states offer fatherhood-promotion and marriageeducation programs. Some encourage an unmarried father to marry the mother of his child. At least eleven states now fund fatherhood programs that promote co-parenting. The programs stress greater involvement by nonresident fathers, offer mediation services and co-parenting classes to help estranged parents resolve problems, and encourage marriage. The most conspicuous state marriage-related programs are those called couples and marriage education. Thirty-two states have at least one such program, as do all branches of the U.S. military. Many cooperative extension county educators (once known as county extension agents) are trained family-life educators. Six states have launched new marriage-related activities that are being conducted by these agents through land-grant universities. Public schools also offer marriage education. Six states offer such programs through high schools as electives. Many more individual school districts do so as well. Florida requires four hours of relationship and marriage education for high school graduation. States have also made big changes in their welfare regulations. The 1996 welfare reform law gave states considerable latitude in establishing such rules. In response, states reduced disincentives that discouraged couples from remaining together in households that receive welfare grants. Under the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) rules, welfare was generally available only to single-parent families, with limited funds for two-parent families. Since 2002, thirty-six states have eliminated two-parent family eligibility requirements, and another eleven have partially eliminated them. As of 2002, twenty-two states operated separate programs for two-parent families and funded them solely with state dollars. Families served are exempt from federal participation and work requirements. Nine states offer welfare recipients financial incentives to marry,

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including a one-hundred-dollar monthly bonus. Other incentives exclude a spouse’s earnings in determining financial eligibility or grant amounts, and forgive child-support arrearages owed by a noncustodial parent to the state if the parents marry or reunite. Incentives for Action The economic implications of single parenthood have featured conspicuously in state debates about marriage and family policy. In 1999, for example, Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating launched the nation’s largest marriage initiative, supported with $10 million of unspent federal welfare funds, to cut the state’s high divorce and out-of-wedlock birth rates. Keating’s move came on the heels of a 1998 report showing that his state’s economy was flagging in part because high rates of family breakdown were driving many Oklahomans into poverty. Likewise, Louisiana first authorized covenant marriage in 1997 following legislative debate that highlighted the costs of poverty resulting from divorce (Sanchez et al. 2002). At the federal level, concern about marriage in the welfare reforms was driven primarily by increasing rates of unmarried births and corresponding claims on public assistance. Activists who had already been working to promote marriage understandably welcomed this novel role for the federal government. But both liberals and conservatives expressed reservations. Among conservatives, the debate was over whether the focus of federal efforts should be on reducing illegitimacy or mandating work for welfare recipients. Those endorsing the latter argued that there was little evidence that efforts to reduce unmarried births could work (Haskins 2006). Liberal concern was similar. The National Organization for Women (NOW), for example, objected that marriage promotion efforts divert welfare funds from basic economic supports for mother-headed families, intrude on private decisions, place some women at greater risk of domestic violence by coercing them to stay in bad or dangerous marriages, waste public funds on ineffective policies, limit state flexibility by earmarking welfare funds for specified programs, and generally lack public support (NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund 2005). Although these and similar concerns continue, policy analysts Will Marshall and Isabel Sawhill (2004) see a political consensus emerging over complex challenges facing American families—single, teen, and unwed parenting; economic insecurity; health care; and balancing home and work. Like others, they call for comprehensive family policy to address all such issues.

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Much of the contemporary federal concern about marriage and unmarried fertility sounds much like arguments first advanced in 1965 by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then assistant secretary of labor for President Lyndon Johnson (Moynihan 1965). Moynihan claimed that female-headed households were a primary cause of poverty and welfare dependency among Black Americans. In 1984, welfare critic Charles Murray elaborated this theme, arguing that welfare encouraged dependency by making it economically rational for a poor mother to remain single and unemployed rather than marry. The problem of welfare dependency became a central theme in the federal welfare reform debate that led to a major overhaul of welfare policies in 1996. As political scientist R. Kent Weaver writes, Murray’s “conservative diagnoses and prescriptions for welfare reform were part of a broader conservative renaissance that began in the 1970s and gained momentum with the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980. . . . Conservatives were far from united on their prescriptions for what to do about AFDC . . . but did succeed in making the reduction of welfare dependency the focus of welfare debates in the 1990s” (2000, 104–5). Tackling welfare dependency would require dealing with issues of unmarried births, moving welfare recipients into the labor force, and making fathers contribute—financially, at least—to rearing their children. These issues, raised by Congress in initial deliberations about welfare reform during the 1980s and 1990s, continue to be debated today. Thus welfare reform was a turning point in American family policy because it sought to promote traditional family norms. It defined many demographic trends as problematic and dangerous (for example, increases in out-of-wedlock births, high dependency on state assistance for rearing children, high rates of single-mother families produced by divorce). In short, welfare reform made a public issue of what many had previously viewed as little more than private choices about alternative living arrangements. A natural question to be asked about the various marriage-movement reforms being enacted is whether they might have any consequences of note on rates of marriage, divorce, unmarried childbirth, or cohabitation. All these proclamations, events, programs, acts, and (in a very few cases) laws are designed to combat the “retreat from marriage” that began in the second half of the twentieth century. Could they have their intended effects? It is much too soon to try to answer such a question definitively, although very serious research programs are now being conducted to do just that. The Supporting Healthy Marriages, Community Healthy Marriage Initiatives: An

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Evaluation, and the Growing Healthy Families research projects sponsored by the Administration for Children and Families (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2006) have this as their explicit objectives. All three projects will span many years and will study thousands of individuals.

Conclusion We began this chapter by noting the changing values and demographics that have come to surround marriages in the United States. Some say these changes have supplanted a “culture of marriage” with a “culture of divorce” (Whitehead 1997). Rhetorical flourish aside, we argue that these changes stimulated concern about family and marriage patterns that has in turn fostered a national movement, what we and others call the marriage movement. We are only now beginning to ask serious scientific questions about the many programs and policies undertaken by those involved in the marriage movement. This present study is the only comprehensive evaluation yet conducted of one of the signal achievements of the marriage movement, the covenant marriage laws passed in Louisiana. In the next chapter, we consider the legal, historical, and political forces that led to the passage of Louisiana’s covenant marriage legislation. Chapter 3 considers whether covenant marriage was implemented successfully in Louisiana. Chapter 4 examines what social science researchers call selection effects—what are the characteristics of those who choose covenant marriage, do they differ in significant ways from those who choose standard marriage, and most important for any rigorous study, do these differences affect the validity of the findings? Chapter 5 takes up in some detail a key way that covenant marriages are distinguished from standard marriages, namely, in the degree of religious sentiment and behavior that characterizes covenant marriages. While it is true that the two kinds of marriages here differ in many ways, they are most distinct in the role religious belief and faith plays. Compared even with very religious standard couples, the covenants are remarkable in their intensity of religiosity and shared mutuality of faith. In the remaining two analysis chapters, we return again to the basic policy-relevant questions of whether covenant marriage, or its constituent components of premarital and marital counseling, promote marital quality and stability. Chapter 6 demonstrates that covenant marriages are not just different from standard marriages in the beginning, but they evolve and mature differently as the years pass. Chapter 7 documents that covenant

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marriages have much lower divorce rates, about half the rate among standard couples. We find that the enhanced marital quality associated with maturing covenant marriages are tied very strongly to religiosity. Similarly, we find that the lower divorce rates of covenant marriage are driven by the effects of both the husband’s and wife’s religiosity and their commitment to an initial intensive participation in premarital counseling. We conclude with reflections about the intended and unintended effects of marriage reform and the lessons we have learned from its various components. We speculate on the utility of premarital counseling (or education) as well as marriage counseling. We also close with some thoughts about the larger, more challenging issue raised by the connection between civil and religious marriage and the challenges this poses for social policy.

Chapter 2

Covenant Marriage in Louisiana Legal and Historical Background

Y T

o our knowledge, the first covenant marriage proposal was introduced by Henri Mazeaud in France in 1945 (Dalloz 1945, 11–12). At the time, the French Civil Code was being revised, and Mazeaud proposed a unique solution to the debate: The French family is . . . an ephemeral group. It is broken up at the whim of its members. Marriage, which founds it, is provisional. It endures as long as the happiness of the spouses endures. Divorce is there in order to rupture marriage. Everything has been said in order to defend and to combat divorce. The debate is irritating, because in it conscience, intransigence, egoism, and sectarianism collide. No one wants to concede. . . . It is possible to reach agreement, both in liberty and by liberty. Some want a marriage that divorce dissolves; others, an indissoluble marriage. Then let each choose! Our laws have, in succession, decreed first indissoluble marriage, then dissolvable marriage. Let them [now] decree marriage dissolvable or indissoluble according to the choice of the futures spouses! . . . Two marriages are available: one, which divorce will break up; the other, which only death will break up. (Dalloz 1945, 12; Mazeaud 1995)

Mazeaud offered several amendments to existing law that would make this option possible. He suggested that when couples apply for their marriages, they be told (by the clerk of court) about indissoluble marriages, and that if applicants wished to have such a marriage, they would have to ask for it. Each applicant (male and female) would be required to swear to the court that they 21

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wished to enter an indissoluble marriage. Mazeaud appeared to accept the possibility of dissolving “indissoluble” marriages in, for example, the case of adultery, but otherwise, indissoluble marriages were to be just that. The Mazeaud proposal failed in committee, but it is noteworthy for offering a novel idea—a choice between two marriage regimes—and one that would resurface in largely the same terms in the United States in the 1990s, when Florida State Representative Daniel Webster introduced a covenant marriage resolution quite similar to what Mazeaud had proposed nearly a half century before. Webster’s bill never received a hearing, but it served as the model for the bill enacted in Louisiana seven years later in 1996. Webster’s proposal specifically called for the creation of a new form of marriage that could be ended solely on the grounds of adultery. Individuals seeking to enter such a union would be required to obtain premarital counseling from a member of the clergy or a marriage counselor and present proof that such counseling occurred prior to obtaining a marriage license. The counseling would include a discussion of the seriousness of entering one of these “covenant” marriages. The couple would also be required to make a notarized declaration of intent when applying for a marriage license. A covenant marriage could only be dissolved by reason of adultery. Further, if it appears that the parties were colluding in the divorce, or if both parties were guilty of adultery, a divorce would not be granted. Seven years later, the Louisiana law was drafted by Louisiana State University School of Law Professor Katherine S. Spaht. Spaht had been heavily involved in fighting both issues for many years, writing law reviews and editorials, making television appearances, writing legal memoranda, and actively lobbying the state legislature. She was motivated by two legal developments in Louisiana that she believed were harming the interests of children. The first, according to interviews with and written comments from Spaht, was an amendment to the Louisiana constitution in 1995 that altered the provisions of the legal principle of forced heirship. Louisiana is the only state to require that a percentage of one’s estate be left to one’s children. Prior to 1980, the portion of such estate that was subject to forced heirship ranged from one-third to two-thirds, depending on the number of surviving children. In 1990, the legislature attempted to eliminate forced heirship entirely for all children older than twenty-four, but the state supreme court struck down this effort (relying, in part, on an article by Spaht). In 1995, the state constitution was amended to authorize the legislature to limit the practice of forced heirship only to children under age twenty-four, those incapable of caring for themselves, and grandchildren whose parents were

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under age twenty-four (Article 1493 of the Louisiana Civil Code). Professor Spaht saw the new law as undermining the “legal protection against a parent’s unjust disinheritance of his children . . . most often children, usually those of a former marriage alienated from the deceased by virtue of a divorce from the other parent” (Spaht 2004, 240). The second precipitating event for Spaht was enactment of more liberal (no-fault) state divorce laws in 1990 after seven years of deliberation by the Marriage/Persons Committee of the Louisiana State Law Institute (of which Spaht was reporter). The committee had recommended that the revised laws include provisions to ameliorate the disparate impact of no-fault divorce on women and children (expanding divorced women’s ability to receive alimony, even if found guilty in a fault-divorce proceeding). The legislature accepted the entire package of committee recommendations easing divorce but rejected the provisions expanding divorced women’s ability to receive alimony. Spaht had fought for this provision because she believed it would serve as a disincentive for men to seek divorce and would also improve the circumstances of women after divorce (Rigby and Spaht 1993). These two events, and Spaht’s long-standing interest in legal reform in matters concerning children, led her to pursue marriage and divorce reform as a religious mission. As she said, “It was in my own garden on the day after the amendment’s passage that on my knees I promised the Lord that I would do something about the scourge of divorce” (personal communication, September 9, 2004). In her search for a way to tackle the divorce issue, Spaht discovered a package of ten state bills introduced in 1996 (and later defeated) by then– State Representative Jessie Dahlman of Michigan that would, among other things, eliminate unilateral no-fault divorce. In one of Dahlman’s bills, when no minor children were involved, both spouses would be required to seek a divorce in order to obtain it through no-fault provisions. If children were involved, or if only one spouse sought it, divorce would be available only on traditional fault grounds (adultery, physical incompetence, desertion for two years, extreme cruelty, imprisonment for three years, significant or repetitive physical or mental abuse of spouse or children, or abuse of alcohol or controlled substances). Other elements of the package would require counseling before both marriage and divorce, alimony schedules for people married more than ten years, and parenting plans in divorce (Michigan House Bill 4432). During the same year, Spaht met a freshman state representative, Tony Perkins, in the Louisiana legislature through a mutual friend. (Perkins went

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on to head the Family Research Council.) He and Spaht soon began working together to identify various divorce-reform proposals, including the Dahlman package and the covenant marriage proposal first introduced by Representative Webster in Florida. Spaht drafted both a covenant marriage bill and a divorce-reform bill that would have limited divorce for couples with children under age twenty-four to fault grounds only. Perkins introduced the covenant marriage bill in the Louisiana House in 1996, and Senator Max Jordan introduced the divorce-reform bill in the Senate the following year. Spaht’s strategy was to have both bills introduced in different chambers of the legislature to determine the more popular of the two reform efforts. As Spaht said in her interview, she expected both bills to fail. But that is not how things turned out. First, Louisiana Governor Mike Foster (R) had worked with the speaker of the house and president of the senate to exclude most lawyers from the judiciary committee on the calculated premise that doing so would help him pass tort reform. Lawyer-legislators, Spaht believed, are typically opposed to both divorce and tort reform, so their exclusion on this key committee aided her effort tremendously. In addition, Tony Perkins, in the second year of his first term as representative, had begun to recruit cosponsors for the bill. Before the first hearing in the committee, Perkins had assembled twenty-seven cosponsors, a majority of the committee. While Perkins was recruiting cosponsors, Max Jordan’s divorce-reform bill came before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. The committee took no position on the bill and agreed to allow it to be heard on the floor. Jordan’s bill came up on the floor of the Senate as the last item to be considered before adjournment. Although it failed, twelve senators had voted in favor. The very same night that Jordan’s bill failed, the covenant marriage bill came before the House Judiciary Committee. Perkins, alone, testified in the House committee, because he already had sufficient votes and knew the committee would approve it. Spaht, along with a number of pastors and the lobbyist for the Catholic Church, were in the committee room at the time. The bill passed overwhelmingly with opposition only from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). As they left the committee room after the vote, Spaht and Perkins overheard the sergeant at arms discussing Max Jordan’s floor speech in the Senate, culminating with the bill’s defeat. Spaht asked if the session had adjourned and was told that it had. With the help of two cleaning staff, Spaht went through the trashcans in the Senate chamber to find the floorvote printout (allowing her to see who had voted for and who against). Spaht

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reasoned that the twelve senators who had voted for Jordan’s bill (which was more dramatic than the covenant marriage proposal) would also vote for covenant marriage. This allowed her to focus her lobbying efforts on those who voted against it, including those on the Senate Committee on Judiciary. She faxed the roll-call vote to Perkins the next day, and the two began lobbying. Several conservative Protestant clergy who had supported Perkins’ bill helped Spaht lobby the floor of the House before the bill was considered. The ministers lobbied the more conservative members, while Spaht lobbied the more liberal members. The House added an amendment to include commission of a felony and sentence to imprisonment as permissible grounds for divorce. Rep. Sharon Weston (an African-American in favor of the bill) called the question. Debate ended, and the bill passed the House 91–8. Spaht then began lobbying the senators on the Committee on Judiciary. Relying heavily on notes she had taken a few days earlier at a conference in which psychologist Judith Wallerstein discussed her own research (showing the largely negative consequences of divorce for children), Spaht prepared a typed summary of these consequences. Perkins arranged to have the minister of one opponent (Senator John Guidry) speak to the senator to encourage him to change his mind. Guidry was concerned that people would be confused by the option of two forms of marriage. Spaht then contacted the attorney general’s first assistant to determine that it would be possible to distribute a brochure to all applicants for a marriage license. Once assured, she explained to Guidry (with his minister looking on) that such a pamphlet would clarify the issues. This satisfied him. When the bill came up, the only opposition was by the ACLU. The bill passed the committee 5–1, with an amendment to permit a divorce for living separate and apart for three years and requiring distribution of the pamphlet. It then went to the floor of the Senate for a vote. At the request of two of Spaht’s friends (one a lobbyist for domesticviolence victims and the other an advocate for women’s health care), Perkins added physical and sexual abuse as grounds for immediate divorce (in return for some female senators’ votes for an amendment to another bill by Perkins on an insurance issue). Without Spaht or Perkins realizing it, however, this amendment was drafted to include mental cruelty among the permissible grounds for divorce. The bill passed overwhelmingly on the floor of the Senate. The addition of the mental cruelty amendment in the senate version required that the bill go to conference committee for resolution. In the conference committee, mental cruelty was deleted in return for reducing the waiting period for a no-fault covenant marriage divorce from

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three to two years. Perkins called the governor to ensure that he would sign the bill if passed. The conference committee report was approved at 4:00 p.m. the last day of the session before adjournment at 6:00. Covenant marriage legislation was enacted in Louisiana on August 15, 1997. Since then, all couples wishing to enter a covenant marriage (whether unmarried, or already married but wishing to change to a covenant marriage) must first participate in premarital counseling with a state-recognized counselor, either religious or secular professional (see Louisiana Revised Statutes 1998 for all statutory references; the entire law is reproduced in appendix B2.1). By law, counseling must cover the seriousness of marriage, the intention of the couple that their marriage be lifelong, the agreement that the partners will seek marital counseling in times of marital difficulties, and the restricted grounds for divorce. (A later “fine-tuning” amendment allows the counselor to present the couple with a brochure explaining the restricted grounds for divorce in a covenant marriage; this mollified Catholic priests whose Pre-Canna counseling conventions preclude any mention of divorce.) The couple seeking a covenant marriage must present three documents to the clerk of court (the affidavits and declarations are essentially the same for those about to be married and those who are converting from a standard to a covenant marriage): (1) a notarized affidavit (signed by the couple) attesting that the required counseling occurred; (2) a signed attestation by the counselor that the counseling was received; and (3) a Declaration of Intent affirming that marriage is for life, that each partner has disclosed everything that could adversely affect the decision to marry, that premarital counseling was received, and the agreement to take all reasonable efforts to preserve the marriage, including marital counseling. The Declaration of Intent also states that the couple agrees to be bound by the Louisiana law of covenant marriage. On its face, this choice-of-laws clause would appear to prevent a couple from marrying in a covenant ceremony and then obtaining a no-fault divorce in another (non-covenant marriage) jurisdiction. It is unclear, however, whether other states would apply their own or Louisiana law in dissolving a covenant marriage sought outside Louisiana. Legal scholar Peter Hay (2004), for example, argues that the court outside Louisiana could apply its own law or that of Louisiana, but both law and practice suggest it would apply its own. The affidavits and declarations are essentially the same for those about to be married and those who are converting from a standard to a covenant marriage. The forms are reproduced in appendix C.3. Each

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applicant for a covenant marriage is also given a brochure produced and distributed by the attorney general (see appendix C.3). In summary, covenant marriage requires minimal premarital counseling, a legally binding Declaration of Intent in which the parties agree to the binding laws established by their choice of marriage regimes, including the requirement to take all “reasonable steps” to preserve their marriage, including marriage counseling to resolve marital problems, and submission to more limited grounds for divorce. Divorce may be granted for the traditional marital faults including infidelity, physical or sexual abuse of a spouse or child, a felony life- or death-penalty conviction, or abandonment of at least one year. A no-fault provision for divorce from a covenant marriage permits termination after a two-year waiting period of living separately and apart (no-fault divorce in a standard marriage in Louisiana requires six months). As Spaht summarizes, couples must take “all reasonable steps to preserve their marriage, including marriage counseling” prior to filing for a divorce: Reasonable steps to preserve the marriage could include sessions with family or friends during which the couple discusses the difficulties in their marriage. Within the religious community, support groups of all types exist which could be consulted in an effort to preserve the marriage. . . .”Steps” could likewise include living in separate bedrooms in the same house (“cooling off”), separate buildings on the same piece of property, or in separate dwellings while the spouses discuss the marital disharmony. Whether the “steps” are “reasonable” will depend upon the circumstances. What may be “reasonable” when one spouse has abandoned the other may not be reasonable if one spouse has physically abused the other. (Spaht 1998, 99)

Much of the subsequent discussion of covenant marriage has overlooked the law’s singularly unique feature. For the fi rst time in American history, every couple seeking marriage in Louisiana (and now Arkansas and Arizona also) has a choice of marriage regimes. In the common law, the terms of marriage are not open to individual negotiation. Rather, couples agree to the terms of marriage as established by the state. In this sense, marriage is less a contract between two spouses than a contract between the spouses and the state. Before the Louisiana legislation, there had never been an option for couples to decide on the terms of their marriage for

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themselves. Although couples are sometimes allowed to negotiate the terms of financial settlements should the marriage end in divorce (prenuptial agreements), the marriage itself is what the state says it is. However much they might want to do so, for instance, couples could not decide for themselves in some sort of prenuptial contract what they would accept as legitimate reasons to divorce. Prior to covenant marriage in Louisiana, that was strictly the prerogative of the state. Covenant marriage is also historically unique in being the first comprehensive legal reform in at least a century intended to make both marriage and divorce more rather than less difficult to obtain. Louisiana’s covenant marriage legislation, in short, signaled the reversal of a long historical trend, a reversal that both resulted from and gave major impetus to the marriage movement. Almost immediately on passage, covenant marriage was hailed by some marriage movement activities as the solution to America’s divorce problem, symbolized by no-fault divorce laws, and denounced by mostly progressives as a huge step backward. The fact is, covenant marriage has been opposed by progressives, conservatives, feminists, traditionalists, and religious leaders, although for very different reasons.

The Public Debates Surrounding Covenant Marriage One of the most hotly debated aspects of the law is its inclusion of fault-based divorce. As indicated, since the 1970s, all states have offered virtually unrestricted no-fault divorces. The only restriction in most cases is a short waiting period. The no-fault revolution was motivated by a belief that the former marriage regime trapped many women and children in difficult, abusive, or otherwise unsatisfactory marriages. Shifting cultural values about divorce, remarriage, and related issues also contributed. The effects of no-fault divorce on divorce rates—which had been rising steadily until the mid-1980s, when they began to decline—are still being debated, with a rough consensus that no-fault divorce produced a short-run increase in divorce rates but that the long-term increase was probably the result of other factors (see Nock 2001 for a review). No-fault divorce was itself a controversial concept. For many feminists and progressives, no-fault divorce was a good thing given that it allowed women a door out of a bad marriage. By the same logic, anything that decreased women’s options or made divorce more difficult to attain (such as covenant marriage) was a bad thing. Thus, feminists were early and vocal

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critics of covenant marriage. Pro-family advocates, traditionalists, and religious and social conservatives, on the other hand, viewed no-fault divorce as responsible for what Barbara Defoe Whitehead (1997) termed “the divorce culture” (in her book by the same title), where traditional values of love, fidelity, commitment, and obligation were no longer respected. By making divorce so easy to obtain, she argued, the no-fault regime ruined the lives of countless children, who were emotionally traumatized by divorce, and many women, whose financial well-being was jeopardized when their marriages ended. As we have seen, covenant marriage is part of a larger pro-marriage, anti-divorce “movement” that believes the divorce culture is threatening the institution of marriage itself. Politically, then, covenant marriage is motivated by the same concerns that led to pro-marriage policies in the United States. The no-fault regime, many argue, has fostered a model of marriage as a contract, with the state acting as the neutral enforcer of the bargains struck by self-interested parties. At the very least, it is destructive of values of caring and commitment that produce stability in families. Others argue that no-fault divorce has transformed marriage into an illusory contract that provides no remedy for the breach of marriage vows. In this view, easy no-fault divorce encourages (or at minimum fails to discourage) opportunistic behavior by husbands and threatens the marital investments of wives. Thus, covenant marriage laws force couples to voluntarily forswear the customary terms of a “quick and dirty” no-fault divorce and acknowledge publicly and legally that they are making a lifetime commitment to each other. In many respects, covenant marriage adds a clause to the marriage vows: “and we really mean it!” Other common objections that were raised are summarized below. One thing leads to another. If it accomplishes nothing else, covenant marriage creates two distinct kinds of marriage governed by separate legal restrictions and requires couples to choose between them. If there can be two systems of marriage, then why not three? Or four? Or dozens? Some have expressed fears that covenant marriage takes a treacherous first step toward a plurality of marital regimes, including gay marriages, or trial marriages, or marriages of convenience, or polygamy. Once we have started down this path, where will it end? Walter Olson, writing in Reason magazine about the surprisingly lukewarm reception afforded covenant marriage in conservative circles, sees this slippery slope as the traditionalist’s major concern: “Any step that would explicitly ‘redefine marriage’—even in a traditionalist direction—is dangerous . . . because it opens the door to the idea of further redefining it

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by an act of will” (1997, 62). Letting couples choose between one kind of marriage and another is especially perilous, he argues, because it encourages people “to think their obligations might be shapeable in part by mutual will rather than by prescriptive authority alone,” and because “once you let in the notion of choice . . . you start ‘privatizing marriage,’ giving the other side a basis to argue for a dozen other choice-based innovations in family law, from ‘trial marriage’ to same-sex unions—not to mention divorce by genuine mutual consent” (62). Opponents of marriage pluralism argue that a conventional, monogamous, heterosexual marriage is an institutionalized feature of nearly all societies. They believe that broad consensus exists about what it means to be a wife, a husband, a married father or mother. These institutionalized roles are embedded in our cultural understanding of things and allow us to make realistic assumptions about individual and family life. Tony Perkins (1999) addresses the debate on marriage pluralism by stressing how some (those who choose covenant marriage) can serve as models for others (those who do not): [Covenant marriage] is not a short-term approach that simply changes divorce law by repealing no-fault divorce. Rather, it is a long-term solution that fosters the development of a culture that embraces traditional family values. Creating such an environment is, in large part, up to the faith community, but government can foster its development by providing optional standards that recognize the value of family and the permanence of marriage. . . . Our society can no longer cope with the carnage created by the decline of moral standards and values traditionally taught and supported by the family. . . . Louisiana’s experience illustrates how government policy can encourage traditional family values while not forcing those values upon citizens who support an alternative approach. This reasonable accommodation will allow segments of our society to serve as models of effective families which in turn will stem the moral decline associated with family breakdown. The results, although not immediate, will begin a cultural, rather than political, transformation of our society. (27)

Not everyone is opposed to a plurality of marriage options. Indeed, a persuasive argument can be made that the law should grant consenting adults wide latitude in defining their intimate relationships and in coming to a legally acknowledged understanding about how they will share property,

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debts, and domestic chores, about childrearing, and the terms through which their relationship can be dissolved. In fact, some scholars argue that private contracting for marriage makes good legal and practical sense. Alan Parkman (2000) and Elizabeth Scott and Robert Scott (1998) argue that marriage is a contract that should permit individuals some discretion in setting terms, especially for divorce. Nichols (1998) also perceives a proliferation of marriage forms as beneficial: While America has long been known as a pluralistic nation, our law of marriage and divorce has not squared with that claim. Louisiana’s covenant marriage law moves toward recognizing that people desire and choose different paths for their own lives, both individually and communally. This is a salutary move. We should build upon Louisiana’s lead and move toward an even more robust pluralism in marriage and divorce law—a pluralism which allows multiple groups to co-exist within society and to regulate marital issues with only minimal state involvement. (27)

Many believe that the possibility of marital pluralism, however, would be irrelevant (neither here nor there) to that immense majority of married people in this country who arrange their lives in broad accord with a rather simple and traditional model of matrimony. On the other hand, there are those who argue against a proliferation of marital regimes, saying that even if the “one thing” of covenant marriage did lead to “another” thing or two, there would be some cause for concern. Although seemingly acknowledging marriage pluralism by his discussion of “optional standards” and “reasonable accommodation” for “segments of our society,” in fact, given the rationale and origins of the law, this pluralistic philosophy that surrounds covenant marriage would surely not extend to gay marriage, the most obvious potential contemporary marriage option. We did not discuss this topic with either Spaht or Perkins, but nothing we have seen in the study of covenant marriage specifically, or of the marriage movement generally, leads us to believe there is much, if any support for such an option. Because both are concerned with restoring traditional marriage norms and values, gay marriage would be viewed as just another reason for why a marriage movement is needed. Spaht (1998, 299–300) also acknowledges the cultural and symbolic, and illusory, link between covenant marriage and other alternatives. In an article titled “Beyond Baehr: Strengthening the Definition of Marriage,” she says that:

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It is still too early to tell whether the “shrieking voices” of popular culture and high courts have changed once and for all the received meaning of the word marriage. It is still possible that we “The People,” acting purposively through political agencies, will retrieve the traditional model of marriage and restore it whole within our cultural imagination. This debate about the place of covenant marriage within this legal terrain and about marriage pluralism is fascinating. Currently, we are in a culture without a singular vision of marriage, but instead facing a multiplicity of battles and a complexity of voices about the meaning of individualized versus unitarily institutionalized marriage.

Marriage and divorce are not the government’s business. Several participants in our focus groups argued that marriage and divorce are not the proper business of governments, as these comments reveal: “I don’t think big government should step in. I don’t like the thought of government [being] involved in these issues.” Another participant in the same group said, “I don’t think government should interfere in trying to keep marriages together.” “Yeah, it scares me,” said another, “to have someone have control over my life like that.” “I don’t think government can deal with issues of morality,” added a fourth. The idea that things like marriage and divorce are not the proper business of governments was a common theme in several of our focus groups. Because of the religious origins and symbolism of covenant marriage, many also expressed concerns that the concept violated the First Amendment principle of the separation of church and state. The reality, of course, is that federal, state, and local governments require people to obtain licenses before they can get married, grant authority to perform marriages, say who can marry and who cannot, establish minimum ages at which persons can marry without parental consent, set waiting periods for divorce, and many other stipulations and—for better or for worse—regulate practically every aspects of our intimate relations with others, especially as we enter and exit those relationships. Moreover, very few objected to the state’s involvement in the consequences of divorce. Many expressed reservations about the state’s ability to foster stronger marriages, but our study participants viewed the state as responsible for providing a safety net, however provisional, when marriages fail—an evident contradiction. Because the state must pay for much of the individual and aggregate costs of welfare, diminished educational

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attainments, higher rates of out-of-wedlock births, and other problems that are among the consequences of divorce, several felt that the state has a legitimate interest in minimizing these costs. The benefits of counseling, both before and after marriage, are overstated. To the extent that covenant marriage may make marriages stronger (and not just harder to dissolve), many believe that its potential success lies in the mandatory counseling provisions. People on all sides of the debate, however, express doubts about the likely efficacy of these provisions. One of our focus groups with about a dozen members of the Louisiana chapter of the National Organization of Women hit this theme with particular force: “You know, the knee-jerk reaction is [that] counseling is a good thing. Well, counseling with whom?” The group expressed particular skepticism about the counseling that couples might receive from priests, ministers, rabbis, and other religious leaders. One participant characterized this form of counseling as “Indoctrination 101.” Much of the concern was that religiousbased counselors would simply tell women, “You should quit your job and serve your husband, like it says in the Bible.” A major concern was that religious leaders might urge that all marriages, even profoundly destructive and abusive ones, be preserved no matter the cost. Nothing in the Louisiana law protects couples from bad counseling or establishes minimum standards of training or performance for counselors, whether lay or religious, so the concern with quality is understandable. The only requirement is that whoever delivers the counseling be licensed to do so by the state. On the other hand, one need not be a booster for the counseling profession to acknowledge that young couples might profit from an extended discussion of marriage, commitment, and fidelity with a concerned adult prior to the wedding. In fact, in our initial general attitude survey, the vast majority of respondents believed that the state should offer low-cost or free counseling for those who need it. Testimony from psychiatrists and psychologists is recognized as valid and helpful in various legal proceedings; counselors’ opinions are frequently sought in custody cases. Thus, many in our study, even among the most liberal, concluded that there is value in counseling, especially for motivated couples. Covenant marriage won’t work because people will always fi nd a way to get divorced if they want to. The legal principle of “comity” requires that marriages entered legally in one state be recognized as legal in others. The “full faith and credit” clause of the Constitution makes the same true of divorce. Indeed, prior to the institution of no-fault divorce, there was a small industry in towns such as Las Vegas and Reno that depended entirely on

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the fact that divorces granted in Nevada were recognized as legal divorces elsewhere. Although a covenant couple married in Louisiana might have a harder-than-average time divorcing in Louisiana, they could drive to Mississippi or fly to Nevada to potentially dissolve their marriage and thereby to subvert the “fault” or longer-waiting-period provisions of their covenant marriage. Generally, the laws of the state where the marriage was celebrated govern the validity of the marriage. But in matters of divorce, it is the laws of the state where the divorce is sought that usually apply (Hay 2004). Because the couple executed a legally binding declaration under the Louisiana law of covenant marriage, however, such a divorce might be deemed void. This conflict of laws has yet to be decided. One covenant couple in our study did, in fact, obtain an uncontested no-fault divorce in another state after moving to Texas. To our knowledge, neither this divorce nor any other has been the subject of legal challenges. An old saw among divorce cognoscenti is, “You can’t get the toothpaste back in the tube.” Likewise, once the toothpaste is out of the tube, most couples will find some way to clean up the mess regardless of the original terms of their marriage. As Olson puts it in his Reason article, “the whole [covenant marriage] effort may prove beside the point if covenanters who change their minds can simply hop the border and file for divorce in another state whose laws do not recognize the covenant option” (1997, 9). Few quarrel with the conclusion that couples intent on dissolving their marriages will always find ways to do so. But how might things change when the aggrieved party, usually but not always the wife, has grounds for a civil suit to recover damages resulting from the breach of the marital contract? The potential deterrent effects of this on divorce and bad behavior (by either partner) should not be dismissed out of hand. Covenant marriage is a return to the “bad old days” where women and children were often trapped in unsatisfactory marriages (or worse). Contemporary feminism has developed in part as a reaction against traditionally defined female roles. No-fault divorce and the more general relaxation of traditional expectations about what women could and could not do were hard-won and significant victories for the feminist cause, and the rights won in that struggle are not to be lightly surrendered. In some variants of the feminist worldview, efforts to strengthen marriage or prevent divorce are looked on with misgivings because, they believe, women tend to suffer when marriages are “strong.” Said one focus group participant, “I’m not sure it is necessarily a bad [thing] to have easy divorces. . . . I don’t think divorce is necessarily the problem. . . . I don’t think there’s

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anything wrong with getting divorced or having it be easy to get divorced.” Leaving women no way to escape from an abusive spouse is a particularly pressing concern. Many who argue against covenant marriage on these grounds seem not to appreciate the provisions of the Louisiana law that allow immediate dissolution of covenant marriages in the face of a felony conviction, adultery, abandonment, or abuse. Contrary to a common misconception, the two-year waiting period (or eighteen-month-separation requirement) does not apply in these cases. On the other hand, if a couple wishes to dissolve their covenant marriage simply because they have decided they are no longer compatible, that too is allowed but they must wait the full two years (living separately and apart for two years satisfies the law’s definition of abandonment). The feminist rejoinder is that proving fault can be difficult, especially in cases involving domestic violence. Yes, judges can terminate covenant marriages if abuse can be proved. But will they? And will they do so in time? Allegations of fault may stimulate further attacks and more brutality; long waiting periods extend the woman’s time at risk. In an unpublished editorial on covenant marriage, Tulane law professor and Louisiana NOW President Terry O’Neill was quoted to say: “A battered wife’s justified fear of separation assault will loom that much larger when she must, in effect, reveal her plans (this is what pre-divorce counseling can mean) to a man who may prefer to see her dead than allow her to leave” (Caldwell, 1998). On the other hand, it is hard to see how no-fault divorce protects women in this matter any more than a fault regime would, or how a covenant marriage protects them any less. Sooner or later in the process of terminating an abusive relationship, the wife must “reveal her plans” and incur whatever risk the revelation entails. Otherwise, there is nothing the police, courts, or counselors can do. Any effort to stop an abusive husband’s violence involves calling the abuse to the attention of someone with the authority or wherewithal to intervene. Nothing about covenant marriage per se changes the contemporary legal situation or interactional dynamics between abusers and the abused. Covenant marriage denigrates conventional marriage. In the first year after its passage, the Catholic Church expressed reservations about covenant marriage, in part because in the eyes of the Church, all marriages are covenants among a man, a woman, and God. Creating a separate legal status for covenant marriages therefore implies that standard marriages are inferior—“marriage lite,” a barely passable imitation of the real

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thing. More significant, the Catholic Church also objected to the premarital-counseling provision because it requires a discussion of divorce, which the Church also does not recognize. This matter was cleaned up with an amendment to the law permitting distribution of a brochure in lieu of an actual discussion. By defining one category of marriages as better than another (and better can mean almost anything in this context—more romantic, more stable, more religious, more committed, more traditional), the covenant marriage option also opens up the possibility that couples will be coerced by parents, churches, and even each other into accepting the covenant option (“real” marriage). A news release from the ACLU (dated August 18, 1997) makes the point: “The ‘option’ of a covenant marriage could constitute a form of emotional blackmail in which a reluctant man or woman is pressured into the contract and later regrets it.” In one important sense, this concern is not only well taken but is pretty much the entire point of covenant marriage. It was certainly in the minds of Louisiana state legislators that covenant marriage might cause people to discuss their impending marriage more seriously and to test their partner’s fidelity and commitment by encouraging a covenant marriage. As one unhappily married young covenant woman from our study related, she should have recognized the “red flag” when she sent her fiancé to purchase a covenant marriage license, and he returned with a standard one. Civil libertarians expressed deep concerns about religious coercion in these marriages. Katha Pollitt, a columnist for The Nation, expressed her fear in a Nightline news story about covenant marriage that “there will be a lot of psychological pressure on some people, and more than psychological pressure, I think there’ll be real religious pressure. In fact, some Louisiana churches are already saying we will only marry you if you sign a covenant contract.” The experience in the years since shows that Pollitt’s concern was overstated. Since enactment in 1997, only about 2 percent of new marriages in Louisiana are covenants; clearly any coercion has not been very effective. Moreover, we discovered only four churches in Louisiana that completely refuse to perform any but covenant marriage ceremonies. Divorce is not a problem but rather a symptom of the problem. Progressive and feminist critics of covenant marriage are nearly unanimous in their opinions that no-fault divorce is a reasonable solution to bad, corrosive marriages. These critics correctly see the covenant marriage movement as part of a larger anti-divorce movement, which in turn can be indifferent to the often-exorbitant costs of bad marriages.

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None of these critics alleges that divorce is a positive or enjoyable experience for anyone. To the contrary, they recognize that divorce is emotionally traumatic and often financially devastating. But bad marriages are also intensely traumatic, often more traumatic than the process of discontinuing them. Barbara Ehrenreich, in a column in Time magazine (April 8, 1996), reminds us that “just as there are bad marriages, there are [also] good divorces in which both parents maintain their financial and emotional responsibility for the kids.” Indeed, she argues that the psyche-scarring effects of divorce have been grossly exaggerated According to these critics, the covenant marriage movement errs in its assumption that divorce is almost always bad and that virtually all marriages deserve to be preserved no matter the cost; the other side of the coin is that the law really does very little (other than required counseling) to make marriages better, just harder to terminate. As noted above, and contrary to popular assumptions, covenant marriage explicitly acknowledges that some marriages are destructive and require immediate termination, and it provides the legal machinery to do so. In addition, enough evidence has now accumulated about its negative consequences to recognize that divorce, like marriage, is not something to be taken lightly or entered into without serious reflection and discussion. Through the premarital-counseling provision, covenant marriage is meant to help couples better deal with problems during their marriages. For that matter, the marital-counseling provision, the restricted grounds for fault divorces, and the extended waiting period for no-fault divorces are all meant to get couples to take their divorces more seriously as well. One might also ask, if divorce is only a “symptom” of bad marriages, then what are bad marriages a symptom of? Family specialists know that there is no one factor, or even a relatively small set of factors, that can adequately account for the breakup of marriages. Many marriages in the contemporary era go bad for economic reasons; here it is worth emphasizing that the young people of today are the first generation that cannot simply assume they will end up better off economically than their parents. Crime, drugs, violence, and disease threaten families; inadequate schools threaten families; industrial relocation threatens families. As we have already said, the viability of marriage and family life is under assault from any number of large-scale forces, very few of which can be influenced by the legal terms under which couples choose to marry. If state legislators in Louisiana or elsewhere believe that passing a covenant marriage law adequately addresses these large-scale forces, they will surely be disappointed (see Cherlin 2005). We have seen no evidence, however, that this is the actual

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expectation for this legal innovation. Rather, like most such efforts, it is regarded as a small step in a long process. Covenant marriage reinforces traditional gender roles and is an effort to make (or keep) women subservient to men. Many people seem to object to covenant marriage more on symbolic than substantive grounds because the word covenant is often associated with the Christian faith. The very concept of a covenant marriage, to many, symbolically represents Christ’s covenant with the Church. For the contemporary secularist humanist (or, perhaps, Jews or Muslims), any reference or even allusion to Christian religion or religiosity is anathema, and covenant marriage certainly has its religious connotations. It is also not wrong to suggest that in Louisiana, covenant marriage was motivated by deep desires to resurrect traditional marriage values that, for many, include the idea that men should be the heads of their households and women should be deferential and subservient.

Conclusion One must guard against confusing the reasons why the covenant marriage law was passed, however, with the effects it is likely to have, or mistaking the symbolism of the concept for its substance. Covenant marriage may well seem to be both too religious and too chauvinistic, but the Louisiana law contains no provisions that would deny covenant marriages to atheists who wanted them or that would prevent a covenant couple from forging a completely egalitarian or otherwise unconventional relationship. Nothing about the law dictates how covenant couples must arrange their private affairs inside the framework of their marriage. Walter Olson’s (1997) comments about pre-covenant marital regimes bear quoting at some length because they are so very similar to the concerns of Henri Mazeaud quoted at the opening of this chapter: After all, the modern [no-fault-divorce] revolution simply replaced one prescribed-and-invariant marriage contract—one that made it relatively hard to ditch an uncooperative spouse absent proof of serious fault—with a different prescribed-and-invariant contract—one that made it hard to offer or obtain a binding commitment to stick it out in a marriage through better or worse. Some couples entering matrimony undoubtedly prefer the looser tie, but many others definitely do not, and our current [no-fault-divorce] law deprives them of the freedom to strike bargains they’d want to enter in pursuit of genuine security. (63)

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As these comments should make clear, the practical effect of covenant marriage ultimately has nothing overtly to do with religion or traditional male and female roles. It has everything to do with giving people more choices. Covenant marriage is saying that no one other than couples themselves can decide which form of marriage is best for them. Thus, the law begins to change marriage from a status to a free contract between adults. Those who would oppose giving people this choice just because they do not like the symbolism of covenant marriage would do well to heed Olson’s concluding remark, that “the principle of free contract, powerful though it may be as a solvent, works even better as an adhesive” (64). As is perhaps obvious, a great deal that has been said and written about covenant marriage is misguided, both pro and con. But that certainly does not mean there are no interesting issues or questions raised by the emergence of covenant marriage regimes. The big question is whether covenant marriages will prove to differ from standard marriages in their stability, duration, and overall health. Do they produce happier marriages? Fewer divorces? Are spouses in covenant marriage less likely to cheat on one another? Is there less physical, verbal, and emotional abuse in covenant marriages than standard ones? Are family relations more caring, less conflicted? More democratic? Do covenant marriages promote highly traditional patterns of family interaction, where wives are subordinate to husbands? Do covenant couples have different experiences when they do divorce? Do they avoid the seven-year itch? These and similar questions occupy our attention for the remainder of this book. Tony Perkins’ (1999) stated goal for covenant marriage bears repeating: Louisiana’s experience illustrates how government policy can encourage traditional family values while not forcing those values upon citizens who support an alternative approach. This reasonable accommodation will allow segments of our society to serve as models of effective families which in turn will stem the moral decline associated with family breakdown. The results, although not immediate, will begin a cultural, rather than political, transformation of our society. (27)

Whether covenant couples can, or will, serve as models for others depends first and foremost on whether, in fact, couples in such marriages have more effective families. We devote the remainder of this book to answering that question.

Chapter 3

The Implementation of Covenant Marriage in Louisiana

Y I

t is pretty obvious what covenant marriage supporters wanted to happen as the innovation made its way from a relatively high-profile piece of legislation to the daily humdrum of office routine in parish clerks of court offices across the state. Although a choice, it was a choice that the policy’s sponsor and author hoped every marrying couple would make. When approaching marriage, which form would the couple select? Indeed, it was clear even in the early going that one of the hoped-for effects of covenant marriage was to deter otherwise doomed marriages. The intent, or perhaps we should say the hope, was that having to decide on a covenant or standard marriage would force couples to discuss their respective intentions and understanding of such matters as fidelity, monogamy, and commitment, and that the outcome of these discussions would be to expose incompatibilities and thus prevent divorce-prone marriages. It was also assumed that parish clerks of court and their staff would become educators about the covenant marriage option, perhaps even proselytizers on its behalf. In the ideal case, staff in these offices would explain to every couple seeking a marriage license the need to choose a type of marriage, offer them brochures and informational materials, answer questions, and send them on their way to make a decision. No one associated with the covenant marriage effort in Louisiana ever gave a prediction or even expressed (at least in public) a hope about the precise percentage of marriages that would ultimately be covenants, but there was clearly a hope among many and an expectation among some that the percentage would be appreciable. Some activists also expected the state’s religious leaders to jump quickly on the covenant marriage bandwagon, talk up the option from their 40

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pulpits, counsel their young parishioners on the new law’s provisions, and otherwise promote this more-serious, more-committed marital option. The public support for the law expressed by many of the state’s prominent conservative Protestant leaders did nothing to dampen this expectation. Finally, advocates fully intended that the covenant marriage option would change the terms of public discourse about marriage and divorce, not just in Louisiana but throughout the nation. In their campaign against the problems of divorce, and unwed births, many marriage-movement advocates seized on covenant marriage as a beleaguered army would seize the high ground. Here, at last, was a pro-marriage, anti-divorce measure that could be defended. Those, then, were the principal expectations. The actual experience, as one might anticipate, was rather different. Experienced program evaluators know that a program or policy innovation as delivered is rarely identical to the program as envisioned by policy makers or as designed in the legislative process. Because “slippage” between program design and implementation provides one plausible explanation for the failure of the innovation to achieve its intended outcomes, analysis of how a program was implemented is an essential component of a comprehensive evaluation. There are many reasons why programs-as-delivered differ from programs-as-designed; technical impossibility, bureaucratic inertia, unanticipated conditions, inadequate resources, and the influence of other, unexpected variables are but a few. Many policy initiatives are subverted because public bureaucrats persist in their same old ways despite the program’s admonition to do things differently. This, as we shall see, was a particular problem in implementing covenant marriage in Louisiana, one exacerbated by widespread skepticism among the presumed implementers about the intent of the legislation and its likely outcomes. In this chapter, we present results from several studies designed to assess the implementation of covenant marriage. We rely on a statewide survey of opinions, a series of interviews with court clerks and their staff, and telephone interviews with officials who performed wedding ceremonies. Appendix A includes a thorough presentation of the research methods used for this and all chapters of the book.

The General Public’s Knowledge of Covenant Marriage Shortly after the legislation was enacted, we designed and fielded a statewide telephone survey to assess attitudes about marriage and divorce

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in contemporary America and to see what people knew and thought about the new covenant marriage option. Fieldwork was done by the Gallup Organization and the survey response rate was 59 percent after nine attempts were made to contact selected respondents in either English or Spanish. Our original intent was to gather a series of baseline measures, then redo the survey some years later to see whether, indeed, covenant marriage had changed the terms of public discourse. Unfortunately, funding for the second survey never materialized. Still, it is of interest to see what people were thinking about covenant marriage issues very early in the process. Overall, people reserved endorsement of the covenant option in the early stages. Most people thought it was a good idea, but many were skeptical that it would have the promised benefits. Consider several of the key findings from the opinion survey. The vast majority of Louisiana residents perceived divorce as a national problem, with 69 percent viewing divorce as a very serious problem and another 25 percent rating divorce as a somewhat serious problem. Despite these concerns about divorce and the widespread publicity surrounding the passage of the covenant marriage law, only 44 percent had heard of covenant marriage and only 36 percent recalled the passage of the legislation a year earlier. Fewer than 2 percent of the sample knew of someone who had a covenant marriage, an understandable finding given that slightly less than 2 percent of all newly contracted marriages in 1998 were covenants, a percentage that has not risen much since. After discerning whether respondents knew about covenant marriage, we read a basic description and inquired about their views on the requirements. We found that public opinion was divided about the utility of the option. In general, the majority (50 to 60 percent) of Louisiana residents believed that covenant marriage was “more traditional,” would strengthen family life, be better for children, make marriages last longer, and reduce infidelity. However, 25 to 41 percent disagreed with those statements. In addition, although many see favorable family outcomes from covenant marriage, most (60 percent) perceive it as pointless because they think that couples will always find a way to divorce if they want to. The question with the greatest agreement asked whether Louisiana should offer free or low-cost counseling for covenant-married couples who could not afford it. A full 89 percent agreed, and 22 percent agreed strongly. Fifty-six percent reported that they would react favorably if their child chose covenant marriage, with 26 percent saying that they would react very favorably. Another 27 percent said that the child’s choice would not make a difference, and only 17 percent reported that they would react negatively.

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The public was more divided about whether churches should encourage people with standard marriages to upgrade to covenants or whether they should encourage all new marriages to be covenant marriages. About 40 percent believed it would be a good idea for churches to encourage covenant marriage, and between 25 and 31 percent believed it would be a bad idea. The rest reported that it would be neither good nor bad. Finally, most (62 percent) believed that covenant marriage was a good idea, with 34 percent reporting that it was a very good idea. Only 14 percent reported that covenant marriage was, on the whole, a bad idea. In sum, within a year of passage, fewer than half of Louisiana residents had ever heard of covenant marriage, only one-third could remember the law being passed, and a rare few knew someone who had married under the option. A solid majority believed that covenant marriage was a good idea, but an equally solid majority also believed that covenant marriage would probably not reduce the divorce rate. On the whole, “reserved endorsement” seems a fair summary of Louisianans’ views.

Marriage License Officials’ Points of View The second part of our implementation research consisted of two studies conducted in fall 1999 through summer 2000. These studies examined how the law was being implemented by addressing whether key public servants were explaining and offering the option of covenant marriage. For these studies, we selected seventeen parishes (the term used for counties in Louisiana) of all sixty-four in Louisiana by sampling with probabilities proportionate to size. Size in this case was the number of marriages registered in each parish in 1998. For the first study, the “confederate couples” study, we sent female graduate research assistants and co-investigator Sanchez to each of the seventeen parishes to apply for marriage licenses and record what was said or not said about covenant marriage. In Louisiana, interestingly, couples do not have to appear as couples to apply for their marriage license. All that is required are birth certificates for both persons. So we borrowed some male birth certificates and proceeded. Not one of our confederates was ever asked the whereabouts of her husband-to-be. Our questions in the confederate couples study were whether the clerks behind the counter would offer the covenant marriage option or even signal its existence, give the applicant literature from the office of the attorney general or some other source, be knowledgeable enough about covenant

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marriage to answer a few basic questions, or convey a politically neutral though positive attitude about the covenant option. To confirm any findings, we also interviewed the clerks of court and their staff (specifically, whoever it was in the office who handled marriage licenses) in the sample parishes. These interviews explored knowledge of the law, whether there had been any training to explain and implement the law’s provisions, and their views on the purpose and utility of covenant marriage. Results from both studies are intertwined in the following discussion. “She Won’t Want One” Clerks of court and their staff are expected to inform every marriage license applicant about the details of covenant marriage and ask whether the applicant would like that option (or would like to know more about the option). Louisiana marriage-license applications contain a line that requires the clerk to check whether the marriage is to be a covenant. We instructed our confederates to act like uninformed but interested covenant marriage candidates if asked by the clerk whether they wanted a covenant marriage; if the clerk did not offer the option, confederates were instructed to ask the clerk what the covenant marriage line meant before signing the application. Just over one-third (35 percent) of the clerks began the application process by asking whether the confederate wanted a covenant marriage. In most cases, the clerk simply took the verifying information from the applicant (the driver’s licenses and birth certificates) and completed the marriage license form, checking the covenant option as “no” without inquiry or comment. When asked about the covenant marriage provisions, clerks in two of the parishes gave completely accurate information. In nine parishes (53 percent of the total), the proffered explanations contained at least some inaccurate or misleading information, and in the remaining exchanges (35 percent), clerks gave patently wrong information (such as “It takes up to three years to get out of it”). Our confederates judged that clerks seemed relatively knowledgeable and informed in five parishes, but uncertain in another five. In the remaining seven, the clerks said simply that they did not know the covenant marriage requirements completely or that they would need to ask someone else in the office for clarification. There is no escaping the conclusion here that most parish clerks were not performing the educational functions envisioned by the bill’s authors. When asked to describe covenant marriage, most of the clerks emphasized the “extra work” involved in getting a covenant marriage.

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They mentioned paperwork that the couple would need to get from their pastor and the premarital-counseling provisions. (Potential secular sources for these documents or counseling were never mentioned.) In rare cases, the clerks discussed the required marital counseling for separation and the fault-based criteria for divorce. When marital provisions were mentioned at all, clerks generally focused on the comparatively extended waiting period for divorce, though only a few stated the actual time frame. Our confederates were offered brochures or the required Declaration of Intent documents in only six parishes (35 percent). In eight additional cases, clerks were able to provide some written information when asked. In the remaining three parishes, the clerks said they did not have brochures, covenant marriage documents, or other written materials available. A majority of the clerks expressed some negative sentiment about covenant marriage. In nine parishes (53 percent), clerks made overtly pessimistic, presumptive, or derogatory comments. For example, when one confederate asked about covenant marriage (after being presented a completed marriage license application with the covenant marriage option already checked “no”), a clerk in the background called out, “Tell her she won’t want one.” In another parish, the clerk told our confederate to “just put no” on the covenant marriage line. As indicated, comments of this sort were made in more than half the cases. Indeed, as the confederate couple study progressed, it became increasingly obvious that clerks just assumed that applicants would have no interest in a covenant marriage, first because “it’s a whole lot more paperwork,” but more important, because anyone who really wanted a covenant marriage would know “ahead of time” what the option entailed and what paperwork was required. In almost all parishes, the role of the office staff was defined as helping couples who were already knowledgeable about covenant marriage fulfill the requirements, not as sources of information about the availability and requirements of the option. It is easy to see how clerks would arrive at this conclusion. If you ask one hundred people about covenant marriage and the only people who indicate any interest are those who are already knowledgeable and have their paperwork in hand, one could quickly generalize that practically no one interested in covenant marriages will be hearing about it for the first time when they apply for their marriage license. Soon enough, a rational person would simply stop asking. But this perfectly reasonable assumption directly undercuts an element of the legislative intent, namely, to force all couples to at least consider whether covenant marriage was or was not for them.

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Most clerks equated covenant marriage with a religious movement and believed that the only couples interested would be those who learned about it from their church leaders. Religious and spiritual sentiment also underscored the clerks’ own beliefs. Several remarked that covenant marriage seemed unnecessary because all marriages were “contracts” with God that could not be amplified or improved on by some state regulation. Many clerks believed that the covenant marriage option was “just a line we have to have on the form in case someone wants one.” One even said, “I think that someone in the legislature had nothing else to do. . . . I don’t think it’s catching on. I think this is an idea that will just run its course and disappear.” Because we later reinterviewed clerks in each of the study parishes, it was possible to examine which factors differentiated the one-third of parishes that volunteered covenant marriage information without prompting from the two-thirds that did not. We looked at mean differences in whether clerks were informed about the law; their staff sizes; level of general job training and training about covenant marriage specifically; their resources, including access to covenant marriage brochures; their views on the public interest in and knowledge of covenant marriage; and their opinions on whether the government should try to reduce divorce or promote two forms of marriage. With two exceptions, the parishes did not differ significantly on these topics. The exceptions: Staff in the more proactive parishes (1) were significantly more likely to believe they knew the requirements, and (2) were committed to giving literature about covenant marriage to every marriage license applicant as part of their general office routine. Note that the extent of formal training and whether they received covenant marriage literature from the state did not significantly differentiate compliant and noncompliant parishes. As indicated, we returned to the study parishes about a year later to interview the clerks of court and staff about their experiences implementing covenant marriage. Only one parish refused our request. We interviewed sixteen clerks of court and forty staff members about their training for and knowledge of covenant marriage, their political and personal views of the law, their assessments of the utility of the law, and their opinions about whether Louisiana marriages could be strengthened and divorce rates reduced. The vast majority (94 percent) reported that their offices were informed of the law, although only one-third reported receiving formal training or education to implement the law. The majority also reported that they understood the legal requirements, although one in four admitted to some lack of knowledge.

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When asked to list the legal requirements, we found that line staff were more knowledgeable than their bosses, the clerks of court, at least about provisions affecting their own office routines. Neither the clerks nor staff, however, was prepared to explain fully the new covenant marriage law to the public. One-half of the clerks did not mention premarital counseling or the notarized-affidavit requirements, 63 percent failed to mention the required Declaration of Intent, and 75 to 94 percent did not mention the legal requirements for ending a covenant marriage. Although line staff performed better, with only 18 to 33 percent failing to mention the premarital-counseling and notarized-affidavit requirements, the majority did not mention any of the other provisions. In fact, like the clerks of court, between 85 and 95 percent of the staff failed to mention the requirement for marital counseling before divorce or the fault-based criteria and longer waiting periods for divorce. Line staff in these offices organize their energies around the legal requirements for issuing marriage licenses. That is their official duty. To issue a valid covenant license, staff must have proof of premarital counseling and a Declaration of Intent from couples. The divorce provisions are not a part of their executable duties. Thus, it is not surprising that these provisions were rarely mentioned. “A Vow Before God Is More Binding Than a Notarized Statement” Much of the personal sentiment expressed by the clerks and line staff was infused with religious themes, which generally took one of two forms. First, many believed, and repeated frequently during their interview, that “all marriages are covenants, anyway” and that nothing the state could do or require would make marriage more special than the divine blessing of the marital relationship by God. As this staff member said, “The negative aspect [of covenant marriage] is that it doesn’t change their marital status . . . it doesn’t make them any more married. It doesn’t guarantee their marriage. To me, it’s trying to improve on something God has already ordained. I don’t think you can improve on His work.” The second religious theme that surfaced with some regularity was a concern that the law brought religion too closely into a state licensing process. Respondents argued that “philosophically, there needs to be a separation of church and state” and that “trying to stick government into religion is crossing the line.” One clerk adamantly stated, “The great thing about America is the separation of church and state, and covenant marriage, if it doesn’t cross that line, jumps up and down on [it].”

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The juxtaposition of these concerns bespeaks some ambivalence about the religious overtones of covenant marriage. On the one hand, respondents’ own religiosity made them uncomfortable with a system of two marriages, one seemingly more special than the other and with a name that evokes deep religious meaning. On the other hand, their own religiously based reactions to covenant marriage led them to a concern that covenant marriage inserted biblical foundations into state law. Clerks and line staff were ambivalent about covenant marriage largely because it made them confront—for the first time—the religious aspects of marriage in the context of what are clearly secular jobs. The Perceived Necessity of Public Education Clerks and line staff expressed a near-unanimous sentiment that the public in general and engaged couples in particular were ignorant of the law. Common comments included such statements as: “They’re not informed enough about it”; “There’s no education . . . people don’t really and truly know or feel okay about what [covenant marriage] is”; and “Very few people really know about covenant marriage outside the clergy. If [the clergy] didn’t know, the couples who apply for the license didn’t know.” Most believed that the lack of knowledge was a remediable issue. Said one, “We need public education about this bill, this law, its intent. [Couples] don’t know about covenant marriage. I find that when it’s in the media, when the media plays it up, more couples seem interested.” Another noted, “The idea of [covenant marriage] is great, but the reality just doesn’t—the two aren’t meeting. If . . . the public and clergy were educated, it would be great.” Given this near-unanimous sentiment on the need for education on covenant marriage, one might expect that the clerks and line staff would take on the public education task. Staff and clerks, however, were equally adamant that public education was not in their job description. Said one: “I don’t think it’s the clerk’s office’s responsibility to explain what covenant marriage is. It’s a little late to tell them about it three days before the wedding.” As we said earlier, most staff believed that the only people who would be interested were those who showed up with the requisite paperwork in hand. As this staff member said, “I don’t explain it. They either know [about] it or they don’t. In fact, most people who are interested in covenant marriage learn about it in their church and show up for their license fully prepared to get a covenant marriage one.” Staff freely and frequently admitted their own ignorance of covenant marriage provisions. For instance, one said, “I’m not very comfortable [with informing couples about covenant marriage]. I know the requirements and

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all, but I don’t have it down pat.” Another said, “I don’t feel I know enough to be able to tell anybody.” And staff often noted that they wanted more structured office training: “The people here who process the licenses need to attend a class to learn more about it. There’s no formal training.” Perceived Utility of the Law Most clerks of court and their staff believed that covenant marriage offered several very positive features. Three themes surfaced: (1) Many believed that the counseling requirements were (or might be) beneficial; (2) they also believed that the law in its practice and philosophical intent encouraged couples to make marriage work; and (3) they approved, almost unanimously, of the underlying goal, to support the institution of marriage. As this respondent said, “I think it encourages couples to realize the commitment of marriage. I think, personally, couples take commitment to marriage lightly . . . the intent of the law is definitely something positive.” Nearly all clerks and staff believed that too many young couples “these days” rushed into marriage without benefit of a properly mature mindset. “People don’t know what marriage is all about,” said one respondent. “A lot of them just jump into it.” “Young couples marry today, divorce tomorrow,” said another. “Covenant marriage is a double commitment, and that’s a lot for couples today.” The clerks also believed that marriage and family life in Louisiana were troubled and that covenant marriage promoted marriage in possibly valuable ways. They argued that “the most positive aspect is the publicity it gives to marital relations and the responsibilities of the marital relationship,” and “since it’s not mandatory, why not have the option?” As the latter clerk added, “It was passed for those who might want it, and there’s nothing wrong with that.” Others felt a deeper, more pressing need for covenant marriage: Louisiana has a lot of social and health negatives. We’re on the bad end of the spectrum on social, educational, and health problems. Probably the family impacts all of these things. So, covenant marriage is a political positive in terms of the family. Fifty percent of children in Louisiana are born out of wedlock. All these negative indicators influence the legislature to vote positive on any issue they feel will have a positive impact on social issues or the family.

This same clerk indicated that the state legislature should consider ways to increase the marriage rate rather than decrease the divorce rate, arguing that unmarried childbearing was especially problematic.

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One clerk argued that no-fault divorce was a major problem for contemporary families and that it was unfortunate to have two forms of marriage to correct that earlier mistake. I feel that marriage should be a permanent commitment for a couple, and there should be a demanding process to break that commitment. I guess I’m rather conservative in my views. Marriage has evolved from where we would like it to be to where we are. Unfortunately, there are two types of marriage now. I would prefer one type of marriage that was viewed as a permanent relationship with permanent responsibilities to go with it. No-fault divorce has destroyed the institution in the traditional sense.

Perceived Futility of the Law Despite these positives, respondents expressed many negative sentiments about covenant marriage. In addition to the above-noted concerns that the law blurred the distinction between church and state, clerks and staff thought that the public was largely unreceptive to the law. As one clerk said, “I don’t think [my staff] likes [covenant marriage]. It’s time consuming to have to explain it and ninety-nine percent of the people don’t want it and will say that right from the beginning.” Other staff called it “a waste of time. . . . People are still asking how to get a divorce after they have signed [the covenant marriage form].” Or as another said, ”It won’t last. No one’s taking it.” Staff frequently said that couples were unreceptive “because they don’t want to be stuck.” “Couples tell us that when they are ready to divorce, they don’t want the law telling them they can’t,” said another clerk. In short, many young people marry knowing full well the marriage may not last and they do not want unnecessary restrictions on a divorce, a state of mind that itself speaks volumes about the “divorce culture.” Staff also believed there were significant loopholes in the law. The most perplexing loophole to clerks was that covenant married couples could still divorce. As one staff person said, ”I just don’t see how [covenant marriage] would really improve marriage or cut down on the divorce rate because you are still able to obtain a divorce just the same.” Worse, many clerks and staff believed that the law’s main consequence would be to prolong and exacerbate the pain of divorce. One clerk even suggested that the extended waiting period promotes adultery: ”People do not stay alone or celibate while separated.” A few clerks and staff members thought

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that covenant marriage would perpetuate violence. “Lately there have been too many cases of spouses hurting each other to get divorced, or a spouse hurting the other because one does not want to get out of the marriage. [Covenant marriage] will only push the issue more,” said one respondent. Some argued that ”if there’s abuse, then they can’t get out of it as fast as a normal marriage.” Several clerks and staff members believed the law was only of benefit to attorneys. “If it isn’t broke, why fix it?” said one clerk. “We have lived for many, many years with one [form of] marriage [and] it worked for many years the way we had it without setting up another system that creates problems for people.” Another added, “I just think the overall bookkeeping system is too cumbersome. It will additionally bog down the court system to see which type of marriage they are trying to address.” Staff members also discussed how attorneys benefited from protracted divorce proceedings and court-ordered marital counseling. Others said that a covenant marriage could be simple window dressing, given that a married bride and groom could file for divorce with an attorney, lie about their covenant status, and proceed through a no-fault divorce with no one the wiser. In fact, we know from our interviews that at least one couple used this ruse to dissolve their marriages. (Because all covenant couples sign a legally binding affidavit requiring that they obtain divorces solely on covenant grounds, the legal validity of such a strategy is unknown.) Finally, a small but strident segment of clerks and staff believed that the law was a cynical attempt by legislators to cater to pro-family constituencies without having to do anything substantive. One staff member said, “I think the idea is wonderful, but this is not going to stop divorce. This is flat out not going to stop it. It’s just good for the politicians.” Another concurred, “I don’t see a need for it. Married is married.” Some clerks put it more bluntly: “It’s a bullshit law” or “It’s a sham.” Said one, “It’s feel-good legislation by the Christian Right, or the Christian Wrong.” “It won’t change much,” said another, “just more bureaucracy and paperwork [for] a system that is already drowning in paperwork.” One clerk told us that “it was thought up by a kook who portrays himself to be a Christian, but really is not.”

The Clergy Study The aspect of covenant marriage that proponents find most hopeful and detractors least objectionable is the requirement that couples receive

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counseling prior to their marriage. Several findings from our public opinion survey attest to the wide popularity of premarital counseling, at least in concept. About 90 percent of Louisiana residents agree, for example, that “too many couples rush into marriage” and a like percentage believe that premarital counseling is somewhat or very important in crafting a successful marriage. If nothing else, counseling before marriage should at least ensure that couples have been alerted to the kinds of issues that can arise in marriage and have been given advice about strategies to avoid or resolve them. From the viewpoint of covenant marriage policy, counselors of newly marrying couples are second only to marriage license clerks in their role as frontline implementers. So we undertook another study to parse the views of counselors about covenant marriage and to learn something about the content of the counseling they provided. If counseling is little more than a desultory recitation of pat answers, platitudes, or sincere but largely content-free advice, then the counseling will not have much effect on the quality or duration of marriages. If, on the other hand, counselors take their responsibilities seriously, raise hard but important issues, force couples to confront their own outlooks and feelings, and do what the law intends for them to do, then the chances of positive effects increase. A scientific random sample of Louisiana marriage counselors, both lay and religious, was beyond the scope of our study. We did, however, cull the marriage licenses of newly marrying couples in the state (specifically, couples who fell into the sample for our panel survey of recent Louisiana marriages) and surveyed by phone a sample of marriage officiators, the vast majority pastors or other religious leaders. Sampling We obtained a list of wedding officiators from the marriage licenses that we had “harvested” to develop a sampling frame of newly married Louisiana couples. We culled licenses until we had eighty-five officiators’ names, approximately five per parish. As data collection began, we confronted a much higher than anticipated refusal rate. So we returned to the marriage licenses and continued to cull names until we had a list of 146 (eight or nine names per parish) in the hopes of interviewing four or five in each. Ultimately, we completed seventy-three interviews, seventy with clergy and three with lay officiators (mainly justices of the peace, who have been dropped from the following analysis because none of them said that they had ever counseled couples either before or after their marriages). Some parishes are still overrepresented in the study either because

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they produced far more licenses or because clergy in some parishes were more cooperative. In the end, the clergy sample (N = 70) was about evenly divided between clergy who had ever provided premarital counseling for a covenant couple (thirty-seven clergy, or 53 percent) and those who had not (thirtythree clergy). This is a gross artifact of the sampling design. Our panel survey attempted to enroll equal numbers of covenant and conventional marriages whereas statewide, covenant marriages represent less than 2 percent of all marriages. Thus, clergy who have officiated at covenant weddings compose a disproportionately large fraction of our sample of clergy. To compensate for the gross disproportion, we treat the thirty-three clergy who had not counseled covenant couples as loosely “representative” or “typical” of Louisiana clergy in general and contrast their views and experiences with the thirty-seven clergy who had. Our experience is that a very small fraction of Louisiana clergy performs a very large fraction of all the covenant marriages in the state, and it is therefore not misleading to describe those who do as covenant marriage advocates, or even activists. Because it is the advocates and activists who spearhead all reform efforts, it is of special interest to see how these thirtyseven have interpreted and responded to the covenant marriage law. Results Our data suggest that virtually all clergy in Louisiana, whether covenant marriage advocates or not, had at least heard of the legislation by the time we surveyed them, some three years after initial passage. Nearly all (95 percent) of clergy who had counseled covenant couples, and even about one-half (54 percent) of those who had not, said that they thought they understood the legal requirements for covenant marriages. When we asked them to tell us what those requirements were, however, none of the six principal requirements was spontaneously mentioned by more than 71 percent and some were mentioned by fewer than one-fourth. Most clergy mentioned the premarital-counseling requirement (71 percent of those who had counseled covenant couples and 66 percent who had not), and about one-half noted the requirement that couples seek counseling if problems arose later in the marriage (47 and 63 percent, respectively). No other requirement was spontaneously mentioned by more than 41 percent of either group. Remarkably, only 18 and 26 percent of the two groups spontaneously mentioned the restricted grounds for divorce in covenant marriage as one of the law’s legal requirements.

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If respondents said they did not understand the legal requirements of covenant marriage, or if they failed to mention any of the six principal requirements, we asked follow-up questions with prompts, such as “Did you know that . . .” With these prompts, responses improved dramatically: majorities of both groups (the sizes of those majorities ranging from 59 to 96 percent) said yes, that is, said they did know that couples seeking a covenant must have premarital counseling, must present a notarized affidavit saying they went through premarital counseling, and so forth. What this suggests is that only a few clergy (indeed, only a few of the covenant marriage activists) have a spontaneously recoverable working knowledge of the law’s requirements, but that most can recognize those requirements when prompted. We found several large and statistically significant differences in attitudes between clergy who had counseled covenant couples and those who had not. The latter were significantly more likely to believe that “it is harder to keep a marriage together these days.” In contrast, the covenant clergy were much more likely than the others to think that the Louisiana government could indeed do something to reduce divorce, that the covenant marriage law will “help reduce the divorce rate,” and that the covenant marriage legislation is “a good idea.” Clergy who had provided premarital counseling to covenant couples were much more likely than clergy in general to have received training in marriage counseling. On the other hand, only about two-thirds of the clergy in general perform marriage counseling at all (the others just perform wedding ceremonies), and if those who do not are excluded, the training difference narrows. Responses to the open-ended follow-up question “What type of training was that?” were dominated by “seminary training,” “pastoral studies,” “Bible study,” “divinity program,” and the like. We asked those clergy who had performed counseling a series of questions about their experience, the content of their counseling, and similar issues. There were very few statistically significant differences between the two groups, meaning that couples who seek out premarital counseling because they want a covenant marriage end up with pretty much the same counseling that any couple would receive. Likewise, most (75 percent) of the clergy who had counseled covenant couples said they did not counsel them any differently than they counseled those planning a standard marriage. The covenant marriage counselors differed in a few ways that bear note. First, they were much more likely than other counselors to provide printed or taped materials to couples “to help them prepare for marriage.” Second, they were much more likely than other counselors to include some

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discussion of marital conflict (how to fight fair, problem solving, conflict management) in the counseling sessions. Both these differences were statistically significant. Perhaps the most remarkable result is that only 49 percent of those who had counseled covenant couples discussed divorce during the counseling sessions. Said one such counselor, “We generally do not discuss divorce. We discuss methods of getting help in times of trouble. We discuss divorce only if . . . both are divorced and have children from a previous marriage.” As noted above, the covenant marriage law originally mandated that the required premarital counseling include a discussion of the restricted grounds for divorce, although this mandate was later eased because of the Catholic Church’s objection to divorce. In the face of widespread disaffection with this provision among Catholic leaders, the law was changed to allow counselors to provide a brochure explaining the divorce provisions. Therefore, although not violating the letter of the law, they may possibly be violating its spirit. These results suggest that a sizable fraction of couples who enter covenant marriages may not know what rights they have voluntarily gained or surrendered. As we show in the next chapter, this suspicion was confirmed by the couples themselves. Moreover, there is no guarantee that the counselors who discuss divorce ever explain in detail the restricted grounds for divorce under the covenant regime, as the law first required. The follow-up question “What do you say about divorce during your counseling sessions?” generated numerous responses, such as, “Divorce is against the Christian belief system,” or “God hates divorces . . . Divorce shouldn’t be a topic,” or “Divorce is contrary to the laws of God.” None of the counselors indicated that the more restrictive grounds for divorce under covenant marriage was something they discussed. It appears that many couples are left to figure out the divorce provisions on their own. One objection frequently voiced by critics of covenant marriage is that family, clergy, and others might coerce couples into choosing the more restrictive marriages. Considering the very small percentage of marriages that are covenants, this is not a large problem in any case. It is certainly noteworthy, however, that half the covenant counselors said they had “encouraged a couple to consider a covenant marriage,” that is, suggested that a couple reconsider their decision about which type of marriage to have. In the same vein, four of the covenant marriage counselors we interviewed made it clear that they perform only covenant marriages. Said one, “We have [decided] not to marry anyone without a covenant marriage. If they

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don’t want a covenant, we tell them to get another person to marry them.” But an opposing view also surfaced in a volunteered comment from a Catholic priest in Calcasieu Parish: “In our faith every marriage is a covenant. We do not recommend that they get a legal covenant. Marriage is a covenant made with God. The state’s ‘covenant marriage’ is redundant.” The Views of Black Clergy Experienced investigators know that research objectives frequently are moving targets. As our project evolved, the issue of how covenant marriage was being received in the state’s large African-American population grew more interesting, mainly because of growing interest in the conditions of African-American families in the wake of welfare reform. Rising rates of female headship in African-American households and the increasing proportion of African-American babies born to unwed mothers caused many to ask how, if at all, the nation’s African-American population might be reconnected to the institution of conventional monogamous marriage. Also given the obvious role of the church in promoting covenant marriage, the views of African-American clergy about covenant marriage seemed worth researching. In late 2000, it came to our attention that one large African-American church was conducting a large number of covenant marriages, including at least one large mass “upgrade” of conventional marriages into covenants. We subsequently learned that this church was one of the largest AfricanAmerican congregations in the state. So we sought out the church’s bishop, its associate pastor of pastoral counseling, and its second assistant pastor to interview them about their views of covenant marriage. The church encourages but does not require covenant marriages among its members. Similar to Catholic churches, this one considers all marriages to be covenants; the brochure distributed to marrying couples is titled “Marriage: A Covenant Commitment.” This brochure, interestingly, makes no reference to the state’s covenant marriage law, although all three of the church leaders we interviewed stated that they encourage their couples to enter the legal covenant, and the bishop only performs covenant marriages: “Our church is supporting it [the covenant marriage law] wholeheartedly.” Covenant or not, a minimum of four sessions of premarital counseling is required of all couples who marry in this church. Although religious themes predominate in these sessions, communication, money, children, divorce, sex, morals and values, and the respective roles and responsibilities

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of husbands and wives are also discussed. In contrast to many of the other clergy we interviewed, all three respondents said that when counseling covenant couples, they reviewed in detail the law’s restrictive divorce provisions. Said one, “I explain all the necessary steps in the covenant [that must be taken] before divorce is even a choice.” But all three also made clear their hope and expectation that any parishioner encountering difficulties in marriage would seek pastoral counseling before contemplating divorce, whether joined in a covenant marriage or not. In various direct and indirect comments, all three of our respondents saw the problems of the African-American family as issues mainly with young Black men. The second assistant pastor was most explicit on the point and, indeed, described his ministry as one dedicated to men and to assisting men to become “better communicators in marriage.” (In this our pastor resembles Black clergy interviewed in other studies, notably Anderson 1999; Edin and Kefalas 2007.) His view was that the problems begin at age ten or twelve, when basic male identities are being formed; “whatever man comes along” will be the role model in this identity-formation process. Often the result is disastrous: “When young boys don’t understand who they are or have a sense of identity, they are usually lost later, as men and as fathers.” He was emphatic in his belief that the inner-city African-American community suffers for lack of programs geared toward men. “More females,” he says, “are drawn to covenant marriages than men. It is sort of a safety net. Women feel that men may want out of marriage quicker. The covenant makes it harder for men to get out.” This he regards as a good thing, as a positive aspect of the covenant marriage law. The best thing about the law, he says, is that “it forces couples to try and work [their problems] out. It makes them more responsible.” The head of pastoral counseling also favors covenant marriage as a way to make men take their marriages and marital obligations more seriously. When counseling couples (covenant or otherwise), she often brings in a male elder to assist. Although she believes fervently in covenant marriages, she admits to having been once divorced herself, a painful episode on which she had an interesting take: “God snatched me out of that marriage.” She emphatically does not believe in divorce and would never advise anyone to divorce, but she would also never tell someone to stay in a marriage “where there is physical or emotional abuse, or incest.” The essence of the covenant marriage, she says, is that the partners are “equally yoked.” She describes divorce as a “generational curse” and covenant marriage as “a good effort. . . . It forces [couples] to work towards reconciliation.”

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When asked why more couples weren’t entering covenant marriages, the bishop blamed the religious community: “We need to dialog among ourselves. Other churches may not be informed enough and may not know how important covenant marriage is.” When asked if the covenant marriage law was a good idea, he responded, “Anyone who believes in the Bible thinks it’s a good idea. . . . I was shocked but commend the state” for enacting covenant marriage legislation.

The Engaged Couples Study An additional intent of covenant marriage was that it would dissuade couples who were not right for each other and prevent a high-risk, divorceprone marriage. We tried to research this issue by interviewing a sample of engaged couples and then reinterviewing them six months later to learn whether their original marriage plans had changed and if covenant marriage was the reason. We were able to locate and interview eighty-two engaged people twice. This sample is purely one of convenience and has no statistical generalizability. (Appendix A describes the methods used for this study.) Nevertheless, it provided valuable insights. First, only fifteen of these eighty-two (18 percent) were married by the time of our second contact. Sixty-four (78 percent) were still planning to get married (to their original fiancé) and just three had called the wedding off. When we asked these three if a discussion of covenant marriage had played any role in that decision, all three said no. Given the sample sizes, these data are hardly definitive, but they do not suggest that discussions about covenant marriage stimulate a lot of second thoughts among potentially incompatible couples. Interestingly, among those not yet married but still planning to marry, most (87 percent) had heard about covenant marriage. (It is possible that our original interview is where they heard about covenant marriage.) Among the fifty who had heard of covenant marriage, levels of knowledge about it were exceptionally high. All but one was aware that premarital counseling was required, all but one understood that couples could choose between covenant and standard marriage, and all knew that divorce was more difficult in covenant marriages. Twelve percent said they personally knew couples who had entered into a covenant marriage. One-half (51 percent) had even discussed the possibility of having a covenant marriage with their partners, if only briefly; two-thirds believed that they personally would like to have a covenant marriage. But only five said they had decided

Implementation in Louisiana

59

on a covenant marriage for themselves (and even this figure is suspicious given a statewide “take-up rate” of less than 2 percent). Why does this level of enthusiasm not translate into more covenant marriages? Part of the answer, perhaps, is that for most couples (the exception being couples attending churches whose ministers are covenant marriage advocates), the decision about what form of marriage to have does not need to be made, and for most evidently is not made, until very late in the planning process. Among the sixty-four respondents still intending to marry their original fiancé (all of whom had been engaged for at least six months), only two had applied for their marriage licenses, the point at which a firm and final decision about a covenant marriage must be made. Because covenant licenses are only good for thirty days, they must be obtained fairly late in the marriageplanning process. Therefore, if a covenant marriage had not been part of the plan all along, few couples may be willing to change plans at this late stage, even if they like the idea of a covenant marriage in some general sense. These results also expose another problem in relying on marriage-license clerks to inform couples who do not already know about the covenant option. Most such couples will be very deep into the planning and decision-making process when they apply for their marriage licenses, perhaps much too far into the process to “change course” and seriously consider the covenant option. As indicated, slightly more than half of the engaged-couple respondents indicated that they had discussed covenant marriage at least briefly. About one-third of those who had discussed it at all did so at length. What factors are associated with the tendency to discuss covenant marriage among a sample of persons intending to marry sometime in the near future? Interestingly, no demographic or lifestyle characteristics—such as education, income, race, religion, cohabitation, or children from a prior marriage—distinguished those who had discussed covenant marriage. Not surprising, respondents who had discussed covenant marriage with their partners were more knowledgeable about the law’s provisions. They were, for example, more likely to know that couples had the legal right to choose either a standard or covenant marriage in Louisiana, that those choosing covenant marriage must have premarital counseling, and that divorce was harder to get for such couples. They also were more likely to know that couples in covenant marriage were not prevented from getting a divorce. Other people in their lives were not (abnormally) large influences on their decisions. Couples who talked with their partners about covenant marriage were no more likely to discuss it with others, such as parents, future in-laws, siblings, religious leaders, or counselors.

60

Covenant Marriage

Among fifty-nine respondents still intending to marry their original partner and who answered the relevant questions, about one-fourth (29 percent) had received premarital counseling from their religious leader, approximately one-half (54 percent) had not yet received such counseling but planned to do so in the future, and the rest had neither received counseling nor had plans to. If all those with plans to receive counseling did, then the counseling percentage would rise to 83 percent, and one would again be entitled to wonder whether the premarital counseling requirement of covenant marriage was much of an innovation. Many with plans to seek counseling, however, may never actually do so. Assuming that premarital counseling is indeed helpful to young couples about to marry, one virtue of covenant marriage may be that it compels couples to follow through with these counseling plans.

Conclusions Covenant marriage is an extraordinary legal development and part of a rich, ongoing debate in academic and policy-making circles about the future of marriage and family in American life. Our findings, however, are clear. Very few couples choose covenant marriage. The public knows relatively little about the law. The bureaucrats and counselors who are meant to be the frontline implementers only partially implement the law as originally envisioned. Some or much of this may have changed since our research was done, but this is unlikely. Certainly, there has been no discernible increase in the fraction choosing a covenant marriage over the intervening years. Proponents hoped the covenant marriage law would encourage every young couple to consider the question, Are you serious about this marriage? As the law was implemented, this may happen, but not because couples are discussing covenant marriage. Unless couples come to the clerk’s office armed with knowledge and intent, all they will usually hear about covenant marriage is that it is not something they’re likely to be interested in. If this state of affairs is to change, two things must happen. First, the state must find ways to increase general knowledge of the covenant marriage option, especially among couples who are about to marry. If more people knew about the option, more might demand it. Second, staff in the parish clerk’s offices need instruction on the role envisioned for them in enabling the legislation, greater material support (brochures, videotapes, and related materials), and perhaps some additional incentives to motivate them. On the other hand, by the time couples apply for a marriage license,

Implementation in Louisiana

61

it may be too late to persuade them to consider covenant marriage as a realistic option. Implementation failure is an old story in evaluation research circles. Rossi and his coauthors (2004) tell a story about President Kennedy, who, as he was signing a new bill into law, is alleged to have remarked to his aides, “Now that this bill is the law of the land, let’s hope we can get our government to carry it out.” A similar sentiment was expressed in an interview with Tony Perkins, the Louisiana legislator who sponsored the covenant marriage legislation in his freshman term. Perkins said that as he entered office he thought the difficult part of the job would be to get legislation passed. This, however, proved much simpler than he had ever imagined. What had never occurred to him, he said, was how hard it would be to implement the law. He had assumed that if the legislature passed the covenant marriage law, bureaucrats would comply with its intent. He was troubled to learn that this was not the case. Alas, it almost never is.

Chapter 4

Who Wants a Covenant Marriage?

Y A

lthough the implementation research described in chapter 3 was an important component in our covenant marriage research agenda, the centerpiece of that agenda was our longitudinal (panel) survey of newlyweds in Louisiana. Between 1999 and 2004, we surveyed about six hundred recently married couples (or approximately 1,200 individuals) three times: once within three to six months of their marriage, on average (wave 1), then again at roughly the two-year mark (wave 2), and finally at approximately the five-year milestone (wave 3). About one-half of the couples we surveyed were covenant couples and the other half had standard marriages. Statewide, about one in fifty couples (approximately 2 percent) chose covenant marriages in the years we conducted our research. We are interested in these couples because we want to know whether choosing a covenant marriage affected the course of the fi rst five years of the marriage. Therefore, we drew equal numbers of covenant and standard marriages for our study. See appendix A for the sampling details. Part of the story about covenant marriage is that it appeals to a different type of couple. In other words, covenants and standard marriages start off their married lives in different circumstances and conditions, some of them obvious and some not. Before we can even begin to describe how covenant marriage changes the marital relationship over time, we obviously must understand how the two groups differed initially. The present chapter focuses on the wave 1 differences between covenant and standard couples. The question addressed is “Who wants a covenant marriage?” To answer this question we first compare the two types of partners on basic background characteristics and experiences before their marriage. Then we 62

Who Wants a Covenant Marriage?

63

consider opinions and beliefs about marriage and divorce. We then consider the role of religion for the two types of couples, and we conclude with a brief review of differences in race, income, and education. The results are found in table 4.1. Given two forms of marriage, it would be surprising indeed if there were no differences between those choosing the one over the other. (Indeed, even partners in the marriage sometimes disagreed about the choice.) Our surveys revealed a number of consistent and significant differences that help us understand the preferences and decisions that led to choosing one or the other type of marriage.

Before the Wedding One significant difference between the two types of couples is that covenant partners were four times more likely to have met at church than standard couples. One in five covenant couples, compared with only one in twenty (6 percent) standard couples, initially met at church. More generally, as we show later in the chapter, religion and traditional values often associated with religion weigh far more heavily on covenant than standard couples. We asked each partner several questions about the wedding ceremony and plans leading up to it. Although almost every covenant couple (97 percent) had a religious ceremony, only two-thirds of standard couples did. Covenant marriages ceremonies were also more traditional: only about one in ten was described as “not traditional” compared with about one in four standard weddings. The weddings of covenant couples also tended to be larger. On average, covenant weddings included 178 guests compared with 110 for standard weddings. Covenant couples (94 percent) were also more likely to have financial help from both sets of parents to pay for the wedding. Only 63 percent of standard couples said that both their parents paid for the wedding. Although they celebrated their marriages in very traditional ways, covenant couples were also more likely to write some of their own vows, or add special themes to the standard ceremony. Living together before marriage is the norm in America today. Nationally, more than one-half of all recent marriages begin as cohabiting relationships (Bumpass and Lu 2000). Covenant couples, however, do not conform to that pattern. In fact, they are considerably less likely to have lived with their current partner, or with anyone else. The large majority of standard couples (64 percent) cohabited, while only 28 percent of covenant couples did. Almost one-half of standard wives and husbands had lived with

Table 4.1

Comparisons of Covenant and Standard Marriages Covenant

Total surveyed (number) 1. Age at marriage (medians)

Standard

Her

Him

Her

Him

257 24.2

297 26.2

324 27.1

381 28.9

2. How traditional was ceremony (wife’s report) Not traditional Traditional

11% 89%

26% 74%

3. Number at wedding ceremony

177.7

110.5

4. Religious Ceremony

97%

65%

5. Type of vows Wrote own, or added own Took vows straight from the book

29% 70%

15% 85%

6. Who helped pay for the wedding? (do not add to 100% due to multiple answers) Her parents His parents Other relatives We paid for it ourselves Some other person

68% 26% 6% 53% 3%

47% 16% 7% 62% 2%

7. Who most wanted to get married? She did He did We both did equally

20% 10% 70%

28% 15% 57%

8. Who proposed? She did He did Together we decided to marry

6% 84% 11%

7% 72% 21%

9. Lived together before marriage (percent yes)

28%

64%

10. Ever live with someone else other than in marriage?

27%

42%

12% 22% 19% 6% 15%

15% 6% 27% 9% 10%

11. How did you meet? (wife’s report) At work At church Through friends Through relatives At school

(ns) (ns)

(ns)

(ns)

(continued)

Table 4.1 Comparisons of Covenant and Standard Marriages (continued) Covenant Her

In the neighborhood In childhood Blind date In a club or organization Some other way 12. Number of children ever given birth to None One Two Three or more 13. Number of children born, fathered, or adopted: With your current partner at wave 1 None One Two or more At wave 2 (wife’s report) None One Two or more At wave 3 (wife’s report) None One Two or more 14. Times married Just this once Two or more times 15. Time until marriage (average) How long know each other? How long did you date? How long engaged? 16. Discussed the following at length with your partner prior to marriage Religious beliefs Plans for having children Finances Other people you have dated Feelings about partner’s friends Feelings about partner’s family Marriage as a lifetime commitment

Him

1% 5% 3% 7% 10%

73% 14% 8% 5%

75% 11% 10% 5%

Standard Her

Him

3% 3% 2% 9% 15%

(ns) (ns) (ns) (ns)

51% 23% 14% 13%

54% 24% 10% (ns male) 13%

92% 6% 1%

84% 14% 2%

74% 24% 3%

67% 31% 2%

(ns)

54% 33% 13%

(ns) (ns) (ns)

66% 34%

64% (ns) 36% (ns)

54% 35% 17% 75% 25%

72% 28%

4.7 yrs 2.5 yrs 9.0 mos

4.8 yrs 2.5 yrs 9.8 mos

83% 61% 72% 17% 25% 44% 91%

50% 54% 68% 17% 30% 45% 73%

(ns) (ns) (ns)

(ns) (ns) (ns) (ns) (continued)

Table 4.1 Comparisons of Covenant and Standard Marriages (continued) Covenant Her

Possibility of divorce

Him

Standard Her

Him

6%

4%

(ns)

98% 6.9 96%

43% 6.0 96%

(ns) (ns)

97% 93% 99% 64% 99% 95% 85% 95%

95%

93% 86% 61% 32% 99% 94% 83% 84%

85%

0% 2% 98%

1% 2% 97%

48% 36% 26%

53% 33% 14%

6% 4% 88% 2%

9% 4% 86% 1%

16% 6% 23% 55%

17% 0% 23% 60%

95%

92%

58%

57%

20. How did you learn of covenant marriage? Never heard of it From religious leader From TV or media From family members From friends From the parish clerk Other

0% 59% 18% 8% 7% 1% 6%

0% 57% 18% 4% 5% 3% 13%

41% 9% 25% 5% 4% 10% 6%

49% 9% 22% 2% (ns) 6% (ns) 7% 5% (ns wife)

21. Wish you had the other type of marriage instead Wave 1 Wave 2

3% 3%

1% 1%

14% 12%

17. Premarital counseling? (% yes) If yes, total hours (average) If yes, religious counselor? If yes, topics discussed in counseling (% yes) How to communicate How to resolve conflict Covenant marriage Grounds for divorce Marriage is for life Religious beliefs Having children If yes, % saying counseling was somewhat or very helpful 18. Consider covenant marriage? Never heard of it until now Knew about, didn’t discuss Discussed it Of those who considered covenant marriage, who most wanted it? She did He did Both did Neither 19. Was discussion of covenant marriage helpful? (percentage saying yes)

(ns) (ns) (ns) (ns) (ns)

8% 7% (continued)

Table 4.1 Comparisons of Covenant and Standard Marriages (continued) Covenant

Standard

Her

Him

Her

Him

2%

0%

10%

7%

22. Do you think covenant marriage is a good idea? (% saying good or very good) Wave 1 Wave 2 Wave 3

94% 95% 95%

95% 94% 94%

50% 53% 53%

40% 44% 41%

23. Views about covenant marriage (% strongly agree or agree) Is better for kids Will last longer Is better for husband Is better for wives Is better for society

82% 76% 68% 69% 89%

84% 83% 72% 73% 89%

38% 31% 17% 18% 36%

40% 29% 19% 20% 33%

15%

29%

10%

16%

17%

28%

10%

16%

12%

20%

10%

17% (ns)

53%

62%

46%

48%

17%

10%

30%

32%

92%

89%

84%

80%

20%

34%

7%

17%

14%

12%

17%

18% (ns)

44%

38%

63%

59%

80%

84%

38%

39%

Wave 3

24. Views about marriage generally (% strongly agree or agree) No matter how successful he is, a man is not truly complete as a person unless he is married No matter how successful she is, a woman is not truly complete as a person unless she is married One main reason to get married is to have children Being married is one of the most important things in life If partners no longer love each other, they should divorce Divorce is a serious national problem If a couple has children, they should stay married no matter what Marriage is more important in the life of a woman than in the life of a man A terrible marriage is worse than a divorce Society would be better off if divorces were harder to get

(continued)

Table 4.1 Comparisons of Covenant and Standard Marriages (continued) Covenant

Standard

Her

Him

Her

Him

78%

83%

48%

48%

59%

69%

68%

71% (ns)

93%

92%

77%

67%

36%

33%

19%

24%

35%

36%

16%

19%

5%

9%

8%

74%

80%

54%

61%

5%

3%

25%

15%

25. Political position (% conservative + very conservative)

71%

71%

36%

47%

26. Depressive symptoms (CESD-II) (mean)

11.5

8.7

14.7

9.5

27. Have you had any children? (% yes wife)

27%

28. Years of schooling

14.2

14.1

13.8

13.5

29. Lived with both biological parents at age 16?

67%

72%

61%

68% (ns wife)

75% 75% 65%

92% 87% 90%

75% 68% 71%

86% (ns wife) 90% (ns men) 87% (ns men)

$18.4

$30.2

$21.0

Long waiting periods for a divorce give people time to get over their anger and work out their problems The husband should spend as much time as the wife taking care of infants and toddlers Marriage is an unbreakable covenant with God, not just a contract recognized by the law All in all, family life suffers when the wife has a full-time job A husband’s job is to earn money, a wife’s job is to look after the home and family The main advantage of marriage is that it gives financial security People who want children ought to get married. Homosexual couples should have the right to marry

30. Worked full or part-time last week? (% yes) Wave 1 Wave 2 Wave 3 31. Average income from all sources last year (thousands)

11% (ns)

(ns men)

42%

$31.4

(continued)

Table 4.1 Comparisons of Covenant and Standard Marriages (continued) Covenant

Standard

Her

Him

Her

Him

32. Race Black White Other

13% 80% 7%

10% 87% 2%

17% 77% 6%

17% 77% 4%

33. Partners are same race

92%

34. Subjective odds you will divorce (0 = not at all, 10 = very likely) Wave 1 (averages) Wave 2 Wave 3 35. How often do you seek help with marital problems? From family (% saying often or regularly) From friends From a religious leader 36. Religious affiliation Protestant Catholic Jewish Other None

90%

1.01 1.38 1.61

(ns)

0.54 0.78 0.83

0.6 0.7 0.75

1.15 1.34 1.44

28.1%

21.2%

27%

15% (ns)

24% 23%

19% 11%

26% 7%

10% (ns) 2%

78% 7% 0% 14% 1%

77% 9% 0.4% 12% 2%

49% 30% 0.5% 15% 5%

48% 30% 0.6% 11% 10%

37. Both spouses are of the same religion

83%

38. How important was being the same religion when considering marriage? (% very or extremely)

87%

84%

55%

45%

93% 95% 95%

89% 89% 89%

75% 74% 78%

62% 60% 60%

54%

53%

27%

31%

39. How important is religious belief in your life? Wave 1 (% very or extremely) Wave 2 Wave 3 40. I regard myself as a religious fundamentalist

64%

Note: All comparisons between covenant and standard partners are statistically significant unless otherwise noted with “ns” (not significant). Percentages may not sum to 100 due to rounding or multiple responses.

70

Covenant Marriage

someone else other than the current spouse, while fewer covenant wives or husbands had done so. Combined, 71 percent of standard wives, but only 41 percent of covenant wives have ever cohabited in their lives. The comparable figures for men are similar. Despite such differences, covenant and standard couples had similar courtships in other ways. Both groups waited almost two and one-half years from the time they met until they were married. Both groups had engagements of about nine or ten months, on average. Marriages take place much later in life now than they did four or five decades ago. In 2000, the average (median) ages at (first) marriage in the United States were 26.8 for men and 25.1 for women (U.S. Census 2005). The comparable figures for couples in our study were slightly higher, 27.6 (men) and 25.6 (women), because these are not all fi rst marriages. Covenant husbands and wives tended to be younger when they took their wedding vows. The median ages at marriage in our covenant sample were 26.2 (men) and 24.2 (women). For standard couples, the medians were 28.9 (men) and 27.1 (women). So when comparing the two groups we need to remember that those in covenant marriages tend to be somewhat younger than their standard counterparts, are much less likely to have lived together, and had more traditional wedding ceremonies. Covenant husbands were also minimally less likely to have been previously married. The two groups of wives do not differ significantly in their marital histories. Between a quarter and one-third of each group has been married before. But covenant couples are considerably less likely to have ever had children prior to their current marriage. About three in four covenant spouses were childless at the initial interview, while only about one-half of standard spouses had no children. Over the course of five years, however, the two types of couples followed very similar childbearing patterns. In fact, by their third year in marriage (wave 2), the two groups did not differ in the number of children they had born, fathered, or adopted as a couple. When asked who in the couple most wanted to get married, more women in standard marriages said they were more interested in getting married than men. Twenty-eight percent of standard wives said they were the one who most wanted to get married. The comparable figure for covenant wives was 19 percent. Therefore, it is not surprising that covenant partners were more likely to share the desire to marry. Seven in ten covenant couples said that both partners equally wanted to get married. Among standard couples, the figure was just under six in ten. Even though partners in covenant couples equally desired to get married, men in those relationships were more likely to have proposed than

Who Wants a Covenant Marriage?

71

men in the standard marriages. Eighty-four percent of covenant husbands were the ones who proposed, compared with 72 percent of standard husbands. In short, in both groups women were more interested in getting married than men, and the majority of both groups reported that they equally wanted marriage (although the majority was larger in covenant marriages). Still, covenant partners were significantly more likely to agree about getting married, and also more likely to follow the traditional route with men initiating it. The two groups did not differ significantly in the issues they discussed at length before getting married. The majority of both groups discussed their plans for children and finances, for example. But covenant couples were much more likely to discuss their religious beliefs at length (83 percent compared with 50 percent of standard couples). They were also much more likely to discuss the idea that marriage is a lifetime commitment (91 percent of covenant and 73 percent of standard couples). This set of findings further supports the view of covenant couples as generally more religious. Remarkably, very few (less than 10 percent) in either group discussed the possibility of divorce at length, although it was sometimes included in premarital preparation (counseling) for those who obtained it. Given that all covenant couples were required to receive some type of premarital counseling (and, in fact, 98 percent reported having done so), the large differences between the two types of couples in this regard are not surprising. Even among those for whom premarital counseling is not required (standard couples), approximately four in ten (43 percent) also received it. Religious leaders or religious counselors provided virtually all premarital counseling (96 percent of covenant and standard couples); therefore, their counseling experiences were largely similar. Covenant couples reported an average of seven hours of counseling compared with six hours for standard couples. The topics covered in counseling did differ in accordance with the law. Thus, for example, although nearly all covenant couples discussed the terms of covenant marriage during counseling, fewer standard couples did (61 percent of those who received counseling discussed covenant marriage, or 26 percent of all standard couples). About two-thirds of covenant couples receiving premarital counseling (64 percent) discussed the grounds for divorce, while only 32 percent of standard couples receiving premarital counseling did. Covenant husbands and wives were also more likely to report that premarital counseling was helpful. One initially surprising finding was that large numbers of standardmarriage partners (about one-half) had never heard of covenant marriage

72

Covenant Marriage

when we first contacted them after their marriage (this includes both those who did and did not receive counseling). Another one-third said they had heard of covenant marriage but never discussed it in planning their weddings. The remainder (17 percent) knew about and discussed covenant marriage but decided against it. Given the results in chapter 3, it seems likely that the lack of familiarity with covenant marriage among standards reflects a certain indifference and even outright opposition to covenant marriage among the people who issue marriage licenses. This seems unfortunate given that six in ten of those in standard marriages who had discussed covenant marriage said the discussion was helpful to them. Women expressed greater preference for covenant marriage than men among both groups, and by both partners’ accounts. Covenant couples were most likely to learn about the option from religious leaders or media. Couples in standard marriages were most likely to say they had learned about the option from media or parish clerks (who are expected to present the option to all applying for marriage licenses and, as noted in the last chapter, some of whom actually do). The lack of information about covenant marriage and the failure of parish clerks to promote the option no doubt explain, at least partially, the low numbers of couples who opt for it. Among couples in standard marriages, there is intriguing evidence of interest and desire for covenant marriage. Among standard wives, 14 percent reported that they wished they had chosen covenant marriages, and 8 percent of their husbands felt likewise. A “take-up rate” of even 8 percent would be four times the observed rate and far closer to what many covenant marriage advocates had hoped for. By the end of our study, only one couple with a standard marriage had converted their marriage to a covenant (something the law specifically allows). Yet even five years after their marriages, one in ten standard wives and almost 7 percent of standard husbands continued to express a wish for a covenant marriage instead. Indeed, in 4 percent of our standard marriages, both partners expressed a desire to have entered a covenant marriage rather than their standard marriage. Therefore, there is some degree of disconnect between the numbers who avow a desire for a covenant marriage and the number who actually converted from standard to covenant. Other than sheer inertia, there is no obvious explanation for this disconnect. Based on these results, it seems that the novel requirement that couples must decide between two forms of marriage had some potentially beneficial consequences even for those ultimately opting for a standard marriage. At a minimum, most of the standard couples who had discussed covenant marriage

Who Wants a Covenant Marriage?

73

but decided against it told us that the discussion was indeed helpful. In many cases, the two partners disagreed about the option (as we have already said, women are more favorable to covenant marriage than men), but the sheer fact of disagreement implies that the subject was a source of discussion among the partners, both before and during their marriages. We did not ask respondents just what it was about covenant marriage that they discussed. But we did ask some general questions that proved interesting. Not surprising given the large numbers of standard couples who had never heard of covenant marriage, we first had to describe the general terms of covenant marriage in our questionnaire before we could ask for an assessment. Nearly all (89 percent) covenant partners thought that their type of marriage would be better for society, while one-third of all standard partners felt that way. When probed for specifics, large majorities (ranging from 69 to 89 percent) of covenant husbands and wives believed that covenant marriage would be better for children, would last longer, would be better for both husbands and wives, and would be better for society as a whole. Among standards, the parallel percentages ranged between 17 and 40 percent. Therefore, as would be expected, there were initially sharp differences between covenants and standards in their respective assessments of the option. Views of Marriage and Divorce We were next curious whether our newlyweds’ early views on marriage and divorce offered any clues about their marriage choices. First, concerning the centrality of marriage in life, we asked how strongly people agreed with the following statement: “No matter how successful he is, a man is not truly complete as a person unless he is married.” We asked the same question about a woman. Men were surprisingly more likely than women to agree with both statements (though small percentages of either sex endorsed this view). Covenant husbands were more likely than their standard counterparts to agree with both. In fact, although men are generally more traditional than women in their views about marriage, covenant men are especially so. A sizable majority of males in covenant marriages (62 percent) agreed that being married is one of the most important things in life. Not surprising, covenant partners are more likely to agree that those who want to have children should get married. Covenant couples hold very negative views about divorce. Only 10 percent of men and 17 percent of women agreed with the statement “When married people realize that they no longer love each other, they should get a divorce.” In fact, one-third of men and 20 percent of covenant marriage

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women believe that if a couple has children, they should stay married “no matter what.” Likewise, covenant partners are considerably less likely than standards to agree that “a terrible marriage is worse than divorce.” They strongly endorse long waiting periods for divorce and agree that marriage is an unbreakable covenant with God. Covenant couples’ views on divorce are probably most evident in response to the statement “Society would be better off if divorces were harder to get.” Although fewer than four in ten spouses in standard marriages believe this, eight in ten covenant partners do. More evidence of the traditional views of covenant partners is found in their beliefs about the relative responsibilities of husbands and wives. Although the two types of wives are comparably engaged in the workforce, when asked to respond to the statement “All in all, family life suffers when the wife has a full-time job,” covenant partners were significantly more likely to agree. They were also more likely to agree that “a husband’s job is to earn money; a wife’s job is to look after the home and family.” Covenant wives are also less likely than standard wives to agree that their husbands should do as much child care as they do. The two types of couples agree on only a few issues. Neither strongly endorses the view that marriage is more important in the life of a woman than in the life of a man. Both types of couples also reject the views that a main reason to get married is to have children, or that the main advantage of marriage is financial security. The contrast between the two types of couples is stark and revealing. Covenant partners strongly embrace the legal terms of their form of marriage: lifelong commitment, long waiting periods for divorce, and so on. But they also see marriage as more important in traditional ways. It is one of the most important things one does in life, they say. They do not regard divorce as a solution to a bad relationship, and surely not when there are children. Only a minority of covenant partners believes that a terrible marriage is worse than a divorce. Much more so than those in standard marriages, covenant partners strongly endorse the idea that society would be better off if it were harder to get a divorce. The last question in this series asked about the acceptability of marriage for same-sex couples. Covenant couples were markedly less accepting of such unions than their standard counterparts (though both groups were largely opposed). This issue, of course, is charged with political significance, and it is not surprising to discover that covenant couples are more conservative in their views. Indeed, when asked directly where they stood

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on a scale of political views ranging from very liberal to very conservative, 71 percent of both covenant husbands and wives described themselves as conservative or very conservative. The corresponding figures for standard couples were 47 and 36 percent, respectively. Religion The traditional life embraced by covenant couples is strongly reflected in their religious beliefs and behaviors. The large majority of covenant partners (more than three-quarters) are Protestants, whereas fewer than onehalf of standard couples are. About one in ten covenant couples is Catholic while one in three standard couples is. (As a whole, Louisiana is about 31 percent Catholic, but in the southern portion of the state, more than 75 percent of the population is Catholic.) Covenant partners were also much more likely to regard themselves as a religious fundamentalist. More than one-half of covenant partners compared with a little more than one-quarter of standard partners regarded themselves as such. It therefore follows that more than eight in ten covenant marriages include two partners of the same religious tradition. By comparison, 63 percent of standard marriages include two partners of the same faith. These high rates of religious similarity (between spouses) do not appear to be happenstance. When asked how important religious similarity was in deciding whom to marry, more than eight in ten covenant partners described it as very or extremely important. Standard partners were less concerned (about one-half of wives and husbands describing same-religion partners as very or extremely important). Regular attendance at religious services is very common among covenant couples. Eight in ten husbands and wives attend at least weekly. By comparison, fewer than one-half of standard partners (41 percent of wives and 33 percent of husbands) attend as often. Covenant partners are also considerably more likely to attend religious services together. In fact, they almost always do so. Most telling of all is how important religious faith is in the lives of individuals. Almost all covenant wives (nine in ten) described religion as very or extremely important in their lives. The comparable figures for standard partners were also high, but not nearly as high as among covenant couples. When troubles arose in the marriage, covenant couples were more likely than standards to seek help from religious leaders: among those reporting that troubles had arisen in the marriage, 23 percent of covenant wives, 11 percent of covenant husbands, 7 percent of standard wives, and only 2 percent of standard husbands reported that they regularly or often

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sought help with those marital problems from their religious leaders. There were no significant differences among the groups in asking family or friends for help through the rough spots, and men were much less likely than women to seek help or advice about marital problems, regardless of the type of marriage. We asked all respondents to assess the “realistic” chances they might ever divorce on a 10-point scale from very low to very high. Almost everyone started off their marriages thinking that their chances for divorce were very low, but there were large and significant differences between the two types of couples in this regard. Covenant wives and husbands saw virtually no chance of divorce (average scores of 0.54 and 0.60). Standard partners were less optimistic (scores of 1.01 and 1.15). Perhaps this means only that covenants start out with more hope and optimism. But because partners in our standard marriages were minimally more likely to have been divorced from earlier unions, it might also imply that the partners in standard marriages give more realistic, experienced-based appraisals. For three-quarters of covenant wives, but for only two-thirds of standard wives this is their fi rst marriage. The figures for husbands are comparable. Regardless, both types of couples predicted—correctly, as it happens—that standard marriages would have higher divorce rates, a difference discussed in a later chapter. Race, Income, and Education On basic background characteristics, the two groups differ only in small ways. Only about one in ten covenant partners is African-American, whereas the percentage among standard partners is about 17 percent. Both groups were equally likely to have lived with both biological partners as teenagers, and both have comparable labor-force involvement. Covenant wives have marginally more schooling (14.2 versus 13.8 years) as do covenant husbands (14.1 versus 13.5 years). Covenant partners (both husbands and wives) earn about the same as standard partners do, although the differences are statistically significant—on average, about $30,000 and $31,000 for men in covenant and standard unions, respectively, and about $18,000 and $21,000 for covenant and standard women, respectively, in 1998 when the study began. Mental Health We included a brief but well-known checklist of depressive symptoms in the baseline survey. Participants were asked to indicate how many days in the last week they experienced each item. Women typically report more symptoms of depression than men (Aube et al. 2000; Silverstein et al. 1995),

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and that was also true in our study. Men in the two types of marriages did not differ significantly in depressive symptoms, but women in standard marriages reported significantly higher levels of depressive symptoms than women in covenant marriages.

Conclusion In our sample of Louisiana newlyweds, couples entering covenant marriages often differed from those who entered standard marriages from the outset. Covenant partners tended to be more traditional, religious, and conservative on a wide range of issues. They were much less likely to have lived together prior to marriage. They strongly rejected divorce as a solution to marital problems. They were more likely to regard marriage as more important in life and to embrace views that are broadly consistent with the marriage regime they chose. In many ways, covenant partners were also more similar to one another than their standard counterparts. They were more likely to agree on a number of important issues. They were drawn from similar religious traditions, and they were considerably more likely to attend their churches together regularly. Large minorities of covenant individuals described themselves as religious fundamentalists. Similarly large fractions described themselves as politically conservative. Our comparisons in later chapters of how these two groups of couples change over the first five years of their marriages must therefore be sensitive to the many ways in which they differed from the very outset. Differences observed later in the two types of marriage, that is, may reflect differences that existed from the outset. We must also, however, remember that our couples did not always agree about which type of marriage to have. Although very few covenant spouses told us they wish they had entered standard marriages instead, quite a few men and women in standard marriages said they would rather have had covenant unions. Unfortunately, this implies that we cannot conveniently view couples as selecting one or the other type of marriage. Instead, individuals within coupled relationships have preferences and make choices. Typically couples agree on their choices, but sometimes they do not. Accordingly, we should expect that the experience and effects of being in one or the other type of marriage will sometimes differ for husbands and wives in the same union.

Chapter 5

The Role of Religion in Covenant and Standard Marriages

Y With Jill A. Deines

T

he purpose of this chapter is to explore how our couples perceive the role of religion in their marriages, as well as their responsibilities as pro-marriage advocates. Since the inception of covenant marriage in 1997, the large majority who elect covenant marriages have been conservative evangelical Protestants. Standard marriages, however, contain large numbers of devoutly religious people as well. Still, as we show in this chapter, the covenants attach uniquely sacred and religious meanings to their marriages, sanctify marriage in general, and demonize divorce (tending literally to view divorce as the Devil’s handiwork). Although many married people are religious, covenant couples see their marriages as an integral expression of their religion, indeed, nearly as religion itself. To explore the role of religion, we supplement the quantitative survey data with information from face-to-face interviews with a subset of the larger sample. We compare covenant and standard couples across multiple religious and spiritual domains, with a particular focus on how their shared visions of religiosity influence their view and understanding of the sanctity of marriage.

Covenant Marriage as a Signal We also explore here why covenant couples felt compelled to enter a covenant marriage in the first place. The answer, we find, lies in the symbolic meaning of a covenant marriage. Many chose covenant marriages to “send a 78

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message” to the rest of the world that they feel an obligation to protect marriage for the good of their family and for society at large. Covenant marriage therefore provides a tool to merge personal and political beliefs in a meaningful way. The covenant “signal” serves these private and public purposes in ways not routinely shared by even the most religious standard couples. Some couples may see marriage as a social institution that demands more than love, intimacy, and respect between partners. Indeed, some see marriage as a social institution that requires active proselytizing and spirited defense as a sacred relationship among society, individuals, and God. We are particularly interested in answering questions such as the following. Do intensely religious couples such as covenants intentionally promote their own marriages as models for others to emulate? Do couples who perceive that the wider society is deficient in family or spiritual values use their own unions as examples that serve a public and religious purpose? Do these couples use their own marriages as weapons against the divorce culture? Marriage, and a willingness to marry, signal commitment and exclusivity, acceptance of normative guidelines for good interpersonal behavior, and credibility as a dependable, mature citizen to the partner, employers, and the government. The marriage signal contains both interpersonal and community messages. Serious individuals demonstrate their trustworthiness by seeking personally costly ways to convey honorable, faithful intentions, such as foregoing other intimate partners, entering premarital counseling, or adopting joint religious or social practices with the intended partner (Rowthorn 2002). The problem, however, is that “[i]t has become more difficult for men and women to signal their commitment by getting married, since marriage commits the partners to less than used to be the case” (Rowthorn 2002, 140). For those who want their marriages truly to signal sexual exclusiveness, lifetime commitment, and mutual support, every divorce or infidelity in the wider society reduces the credibility of the marriage signal. Rowthorn (2002, 142) notes that “marriage is like a professional qualification whose value as a signal depends crucially on its reputation. . . . Committed couples and society at large have a common interest in discouraging modifications to the marriage contract or forms of behavior that undermine the reputation of marriage.” Thus, a principal role for covenant marriage is that it serves as a strong signal in a weak marriage climate. For religious individuals, it also allows them to express the sacred (Pargament 2002), and they view covenant marriages as sacred. In turn, this view that marriage is a sanctified relationship

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Affiliation, Religious Participation, Religiosity, and Spirituality of Select Covenant and Standard Couples

Table 5.1

Covenant

Standard

N = 248

N = 304

Shared Denomination and Fundamentalism Both evangelical Both non-evangelical Not mutually shared Both fundamentalist

78.2% 9.3% 12.5% 33.3%

36.0% 28.3% 35.7% 13.1%

Shared Religious Participation Both report that: Pray several times a day Attend church every week Always attend together Religion is core to celebrating holidays

36.8% 51.4% 57.7% 43.5%

11.8% 13.2% 30.4% 17.9%

Shared Religiosity/Spirituality Both report that: Religious faith extremely personally important Extremely important that spouses feel same way

61.3% 54.5%

19.1% 14.1%

Note: All differences between covenant and standard married couples are significant at the .05 level. Sample sizes vary slightly among questions.

produces greater commitment, mutual support, respectful communication, and joint participation in a church community. It sustains a spouse’s belief in permanence. For someone with a strong personal need and perceived obligation to sanctify marriage, receiving a clear signal about a potential partner’s marital commitment is obviously important. In addition, a very religious individual may feel that a strong marriage signal benefits the wider community’s families and children by inspiring confidence about marriage as an institution (Sanchez et al. 2002). Thus, covenant marriage incorporates both an intrinsic and extrinsic signal. Covenant marriage indicates something intangible about an individual’s fitness to enter marriage, but also her or his interest in protecting marriage as a public institution. Many in the marriage market may feel little need to send this signal of trustworthiness. For them, a standard marriage is adequate. Covenant marriage, however, appeals to those who want to signal their commitment to the sacred nature of marriage and family responsibilities, both to their partner and to the larger community.

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Before illustrating these and other religious commitments among covenant couples with excerpts from our interviews, we first present results on religious differences and similarities between covenant and standard couples from the quantitative analysis from the larger panel survey.

Denominational Affiliation, Religious Participation, and Religiosity Table 5.1 presents summary descriptions of our measures of religiosity among the couples. As expected, covenant couples are markedly more religious than standard couples, and in the majority of cases, they share an evangelical Protestant denomination (78.2 percent). Compared with standard couples, covenant couples are more than twice as likely to be evangelical Protestants, and three times as likely to report being fundamentalist. Standard married couples, in contrast, are three times as likely to have spouses who either are not attached to a denomination or do not share the same denominational affiliation. Only 12.5 percent of covenant couples have spouses who do not share the same denomination, compared with 35.7 percent of standard couples. Numerous studies show that religiosity has positive effects on individual well-being, life satisfaction, coping skills, and psychological and physical health (see, e.g., Chamberlain and Zika 1988; Bickel et al. 1998; Exline, Yali, and Sanderson 2000; Genia 1996; Pargament et al. 1988; Pargament 1998a; Pargament et al. 1998b; Pargament 2001; Seybold and Hill 2001; Tix and Frazier 1998; Willits and Crider 1988). Religion and spirituality also have positive effects on marital couples (Waite and Lehrer 2003). More personal forms of religiosity, such as spirituality and the perceived importance of religion in life, rather than one’s denomination, are associated with greater communication, more quality interaction and support, and less hostility between partners (Brody et al. 1994; Gallagher and Smith 1999; Mahoney et al. 1999; Snow and Compton 1996; Wilcox 2003; Wilcox and Bartkowski 2000). Going to church and religiosity also are associated with more stable marriages, greater likelihood of reconciliation, and less chance of divorce (Call and Heaton 1997; Heaton and Pratt 1990; Lehrer and Chiswick 1993; Wilson and Musick 1996; Wineberg 1996). These positive effects are strongest for couples who share similar beliefs and religious practices (Dudley and Kosinski 1990; Heaton 1984). Despite some evidence of negative forms of religiosity in marriage (Exline, Yali, and Sanderson 2000), on the whole, couples who deeply

82 Table 5.2

Covenant Marriage

Religious Attitudes About Marriage and Divorce

Attitudes About Own Marriage Both report that: God at the center of our marriage We turn to God for help in our marriage every day God would definitely be disappointed, if we divorced We try to set a good example for others with our marriage Some people think it is strange that we have more respect for marriage than they do Attitudes About Marriage as Institution Both report that: Marriage is a blessing from God Marriage is an unbreakable covenant with God, not just a contract Marriage is a lifetime relationship and should never be ended except under extreme circumstances Divorce is painful because of the loss of God’s blessing Divorce destroys God’s divine gift of marriage The Devil is trying to ruin the American family Divorce is the Devil’s way of destroying God’s sacred blessing of marriage

Covenant

Standard

N = 254

N = 303

44.0% 19.4%

13.9% 9.6%

42.0%

16.9%

28.6%

10.6%

40.2%

20.8%

46.2% 53.7%

20.1% 15.9%

61.8%

35.3%

19.6%

11.5%

24.2% 38.8% 28.9%

9.8% 10.1% 10.3%

Note: All differences between covenant and standard married couples are significant at the .05 level. Sample sizes vary slightly among questions.

integrate religion and marriage have greater marital stability and personal well-being. Our covenant couples are indeed much more likely to participate together in religious activities. Three times as many wives and husbands in covenant than standard marriages report praying several times a day, and more than twice as many covenant couples agree that they attend church at least once every week. They are also significantly more likely to always attend church together and to celebrate religion as the core of holidays.

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The contrast is even greater for perceived religiosity and spirituality. The majority of covenant marriages (61.3 percent) report that religious faith is extremely important personally, and that it is extremely important that their spouse share this view (54.5 percent). In only one in five standard couples does religiosity reach this level of salience.

Religious Attitudes About the Sanctity of Marriage and the Evil of Divorce We see in a later chapter that over the period of our study, covenant marriages were much less likely to be dissolved than standard marriages. A major reason for this difference is that for covenant couples divorce is inconceivable. They believe that marriage is a sacrament ordained and blessed by God. We also later show that religiosity buffers the stresses and challenges of early marriage, in part by fostering positive views about the arrival of children (which is otherwise a and possibly the major stressor experienced by newly married couples). Table 5.2 presents couples’ beliefs about the sanctity of marriage and the evil of divorce. Five years into their marriages (wave 3 of the interviews), covenant couples are more likely to see a holy purpose to their marriage, see marriage as a divine gift, and perceive the Devil as actively trying to harm families and society through divorce. Nearly four times as many covenants as standards strongly agree with their spouse that God is at the center of their marriage (see table 5.2). Both spouses in covenants are nearly three times as likely as standard couples to agree that they are trying to set a good example for others with their marriage, and that God would be disappointed if they were to divorce. Covenants are twice as likely to agree that they turn to God for help with their marriage every day and that people perceive them as strange for their greater respect for marriage. Only about one in ten standards report a sense of obligation to uphold a God-centered marriage. In contrast, 44 percent of covenant spouses jointly strongly agree about the necessity of a God-centered marriage. Similar patterns occur in attitudes. Covenant couples are more than twice as likely to jointly and strongly agree that marriage is a blessing from God and should never be ended except under extreme circumstances, and they are more than three times as likely to conceive of marriage as a covenant with God rather than a secular contract. Six in ten covenant couples strongly agree that marriage is an unbreakable lifetime relationship compared with only 35 percent of standards.

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Covenants extend this God-centered personal view of marriage to attitudes about the societal consequences of divorce. Covenant spouses are nearly twice as likely as standard spouses to mutually agree that divorce is painful because people lose God’s blessing and that divorce destroys God’s divine gift. Critically, 29 percent of covenant partners agree that divorce is the Devil’s way of destroying God’s sacred blessing of marriage. Only one in ten standard couples sees things that way. These survey items demonstrate core differences between covenant and standard newlyweds in importance and intensity of religiosity and religious attitudes, and a far greater degree of agreement between covenant spouses about the centrality of religion in their marriages. Covenants are far more likely to perceive the workings of divine forces in their marriages (and the Devil elsewhere). These findings are amplified in our interviews.

“The Family That Prays Together Stays Together” Versus “I Can’t Say that I Am a Spiritual Person” The qualitative interviews reveal clearly that covenant couples organize their lives and marriages around God and religion; standard couples may be (unevenly) spiritual, but usually are not devout. From this general point, the face-to-face interviews confirm three major findings. First, standard couples show a wide range of religious, nonreligious, and spiritual experiences, with great intra-couple differences. In contrast, covenant couples believe that shared spirituality and religious practice are essential. Second, standard couples do not uniformly believe that God is a partner or presence in their marriage. In fact, they were usually silent about this possibility unless directly asked during the interview, and many seemed confused by the question about God’s partnership or presence in marriage. In contrast, covenant couples talked extensively about God’s active presence, partnership, and direction in bringing the spouses together and keeping their marriage holy and stable. The third and most critical finding addresses our theme about the signaling functions of marriage. Covenant couples believe their marriages convey messages to others. They discuss how this new form of marriage serves as a tool for sending specific messages to their partners and to the wider community about their commitment to marriage. Not surprising, standard married couples are largely silent about sending special personal or political messages with their marriage vows, and they frequently have dismissive opinions about the public necessity of covenant marriage.

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Couples and Spiritual Diversity The standard couples we interviewed (and recruited from our larger panel study) are diverse in religious faiths and spirituality. One standard wife, who divorced and remarried during the study, noted that she was raised Catholic but as an adult only experiences spirituality through Alcoholics Anonymous. Another standard divorced wife said that she was not religious, but she sends her children to Catholic schools because Louisiana’s public schools are bad, and she attended religiously based marital counseling about her abusive marriage only because it was free. One very young standard divorced husband said that he was not religious, but he knew that God wanted him to be happy and had protected him during his painful, bitter divorce. One couple included an animist/Baptist wife married to a “cradle Catholic” husband whose family had attended the same church for generations. Another couple converted from Presbyterianism to an evangelical Baptist faith, in part because they valued the church’s marriage-enrichment programming. One Wiccan wife married to an agnostic but Buddhistdabbling husband said, “I am very big into angels and meditation and the Tarot cards.” One interracial couple reported that they were both raised Catholic but were no longer religious because they do not agree with all the tenets. They had a “High Mass” Catholic wedding, however, because the wife’s grandmother wanted to see her last granddaughter married in the faith. A few, such as one thirty-two-year-old wife and mother, denied that religion or spirituality played any part in their lives: “I don’t believe in a Jesus or a God. I believe in people controlling their own destiny and making the right choices for themselves.” Standard couples often include partners of different religious traditions, such as a Catholic wife married to a lapsed Methodist husband. Within these mixed couples, we often find further diversity in each spouse’s interpretation of his or her religion. The Catholic wife now attends a Methodist church, without much enthusiasm from her husband. “I still believe in the teachings of the Catholic Church,” she said. “I’m still Catholic, but I think I’m also able to consider things from other spiritual beliefs as well. I find peace in the fact that everybody is so different in their faith even within one church. I think my spirituality has grown in a more freeing way than in the confines of a Catholic school.” Many standard couples appear to “go through the motions” of their religion because they perceive religion as important in raising their children. A young standard couple with an infant and toddler were both raised Catholic, lapsed in early adulthood, but are now returning to the Church.

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The husband says, “We are trying to become a little more spiritual. . . . [We] joined the Church, attended church functions, go to mass, things of that nature. I can’t say that I would see myself as a spiritual person. I certainly believe in God, . . . [b]ut I’m hoping we can nurture that in the boys.” In contrast, our interviews with the covenant couples are rich with stories reflecting their belief that shared spirituality and religious practice build respect, mutual understanding, and positive marital relations. All of the covenant-married respondents described themselves as religious or spiritual (many did not distinguish between the two), and all spoke of their active participation in a variety of religious activities, both within and outside the church. Several spoke of their belief that “the family that prays together stays together.” Covenant husbands were far more likely than standard husbands to underscore the perceived need for shared religiosity. One young seminarian husband whose wife of four years is currently pregnant talked about the necessity of shared spirituality and religion as the basis for marriage: People try to base marriages on a commonality. What type of foundation is it? . . . You know, “we like the same music” or a common bond that you like to golf. To me that’s superficial. But when you get down to the spiritual matter, that is something that does not change. It is rock solid. When we come together, we can pray together. And that builds intimacy between us, it builds unity in our family. It lets her know and me know that we care about each other so much, that we’re going to go to the Lord together.

An older, remarried covenant husband noted, “I think whatever religion a family is based on, it’s got to be a religion where both the husband and wife worship together. I truly believe that kids are watching and they’re not watching what mommy and daddy say, but what mommy and daddy do.” A young covenant couple in which the husband is a janitor and the wife a homemaker best exemplifies this covenant sentiment. They were virgins at marriage and have had three children during the first four years of their marriage and are currently expecting a fourth. The husband says, “I do not want to get mystical, but I can feel Him in everything that we do. He is in the center and we are in that circle. We are always around that. It is the central focus of whatever we do. Our kids know that. I mean, Beth is three. She knows the importance of that. So we just try to pass that on as best we can, and try to make this world a better place.”

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Claiming a Marital Partnership with God Standard couples were unlikely to perceive a guiding presence in their marriage or to feel that they were in a partnership with God. Some mentioned feeling sacred moments or places in their marriage, with wives most likely mentioning sexual intimacy and, especially, motherhood as sacred experiences. But the perception that marriage is a sacred relationship that requires great mindfulness and gratitude toward God was largely absent. A standard wife and mother who is an engineer is an extreme example. Asked what she thought it takes to make marriage work, she replied, “Obviously what it takes to make a marriage work is whatever a couple thinks it takes to make a marriage work. If they think it’s God that makes a marriage, then you are going to make it with God.” One standard wife and new mother of two who nursed her mentally ill husband back to health said, God is not a partner in our marriage. [But] I see [our marriage] as a sacred relationship most definitely. I would say that the sacredness comes from a unity that comes from forsaking all others. Marriage in a sense is like a ritual in which you create a separate space for yourself in the world, for you and your family, and it’s a very sacred kind of space that you do things for each other in that space that you don’t do for anyone else in the world.

This woman does not define this sacredness in terms of a guiding, holy presence or relationship with God. Her spirituality involves a very active sense of the couple’s personal relationship and separateness from others. Even a standard couple who was most similar to the covenant couples in terms of active participation in an evangelical Baptist church and intense focus on mutual sharing of religiosity was reluctant to claim God as a partner in their marriage. The husband said, “Anybody who would say just, ‘Yes, absolutely,’ is crazy. I mean it’s just not as easy as that.” In contrast, covenant couples explained how God is a partner in marriage and that marriage only works in His presence. One husband said, “The closer you grow to God, the closer you grow together.” One young AfricanAmerican husband reported, “I see God as a partner in my marriage. He has the ultimate authority of what goes down in this house. I believe marriage is a union ordained by God. It’s a promise. It’s a vow you’ve made to each other as well as to God.” Unlike standard couples, covenant partners agreed on these beliefs. Consider the following comments from the seminarian interviewed above and his wife:

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Wife: Definitely we see our marriage as God ordained. God is the God of our relationship; he is our source of purpose, motivation, and commitment, and our source of love, being love in action. Husband: Marriage is not two people looking at each other; it is two people looking in the same direction towards God. He is the bond. It is by the grace of God that we have such a good relationship. But anything could happen to damage a relationship, but it is God who will sustain the relationship. Where we fail, he is strong.

Consistently, covenant couples asserted that marriage cannot survive without the partnership of God. As one husband said, “If you do not have God first all in your life, then you are not going to have a good marriage and you are going to have problems.” A middle-aged covenant wife noted that “I feel definitely that they have to have the Lord first in their marriage and they have to make sure each of them is grounded firmly in the Lord. I mean, it’s awful difficult when you have one that’s grounded and the other swaying a little bit. Make sure both of their foundations are very firm in the Lord—that would be number one.” The young covenant couple with three children and a pregnancy held an overlapping discussion about the necessity of God’s presence and their obligation to serve Him as the basis for their marriage’s stability. When asked if God had been an important guiding presence, the husband said, “Absolutely,” and the wife quickly added, “Definitely. I don’t think there’s any way to have a real marriage without God because people are selfish by nature.” Her husband expanded on this theme, noting that “once you learn how to guide yourself, when you serve Christ, then I think it is a little easier to do that with a marriage. In serving God, that has helped dramatically. If I have problems, I don’t go to my drinking buddies. They went through a divorce, what are you going to ask them for advice? We go to the one who put us together.” This argument about God’s binding strength in marriage perhaps was best made by a young suburban covenant housewife with a toddler and infant who met her husband as a girl, was “born again” under his guidance as a teenager, and maintained her virginity until she married after college. She says: It’s not in our nature for it to be easy to get with somebody else. And to say, “Oh, well I have faults and you have faults, but we are going to make this work as a team.” I think that is why we need God. I

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think God created marriage, so that we would need him because I don’t think we can do it alone. I know we can’t in our marriage. There’s no possible way that we’ve gotten this far just because we said, “Hey, let’s make this work!” We’ve had to really depend on the Lord a lot. It’s not natural for you to sit here and say, “I want to serve you,” because you are looking out for yourself.

One singular example of a covenant couple’s belief about God’s power to uphold and heal occurred in a marriage in which the husband was an addict and had solicited sex from a prostitute. His serious drug and sexual addictions were brought publicly to light when he was arrested. He was certain his wife would leave him outright, but his wife had forced him to choose a covenant rather than standard marriage when they first married. She sent her father and pastor to the jail to talk with him about his spirituality. She stayed married to him but required that he undertake Christian-based addiction rehabilitation and marital counseling, and demanded that he rejoin a church and attend both services and instructional classes. Of these nonnegotiable requirements, she said, “He’s supposed to be the spiritual leader of the house. He’s got to make a commitment to God because God’s got to be first in his life. If he can’t be committed to God first then he can’t be committed to me.” In her very testimonial, confessional interview, she vividly described driving to an attorney’s office to file for divorce and having a fight with God. She said, “God turned my car around. I wanted to go. I [told God] ‘I’m not doing it. I don’t care about him, I don’t love him. I hate him right now and I don’t want anything to do with him.’ And just the spirit inside of you says, ‘Shut up.’ It’s not about you. In your life, you’ve got to realize that in marriage, it’s not about you. It’s about your relationship. It’s about God.” About God’s intervention, the recovering husband said, “I know God’s here because if he wasn’t in our marriage, we wouldn’t be married today. [I committed infidelity], so my wife could’ve gotten a divorce, but God kind of glued us back together. So I know that he’s in our marriage.” This story is extreme, but many covenant couples told lively, colorful stories about God’s specific concrete actions to save and “prosper” their marriages. The stark contrasts we depict above are not seamless, of course. Our interviews indicate a few instances of overlap in attitudes between covenant and standard spouses. For example, one standard couple was very similar in spirituality to our covenant couples. Each spouse had been previously married and the husband was twenty years older than his wife. At the time

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of the interview, the wife was pregnant with their second child. They are active in their church and engaged in church programming and leadership. They are acutely mindful of cultivating kindness, forgiveness, and generosity in their relationship, seeing their marriage as a divine gift. But they did not choose a covenant marriage for complex religious reasons, feeling that it would be spiritually hypocritical because they had previously divorced and because covenant marriage legally only “puts a few hurdles there to jump over” and that “either you’re committed to your marriage or not.” Their core reason for choosing a standard marriage was very spiritual. The spouses felt that God and the Holy Spirit are present in their marriage all the time, but that their own human failings prevent their marriage from being holy. Conversely, a covenant married couple in which both spouses are lawyers chose the option for its legal security rather than spiritual import. They attend church infrequently and do not see God as either a partner or guiding presence in their marriage. The husband says, “I try to live my life right for the most part and I believe that has to do with my religion at least up to a point.” His wife reports that she is a religious person, “but not like the ones who go around knocking on everybody’s door.” They feel that divorce has become too easy and ruins lives. As the husband said, “Not that we are big religious radicals or right-wingers. We just sort of thought, ‘Hey, we really don’t have plans to get divorced anyway. We might as well sign up for the strongest contract.’” These illustrations of a practical, nonreligious reason to choose a covenant marriage and deeply religious reason to choose a standard marriage, however, were the exceptions to an otherwise clear and very strong pattern of greater perceived religiosity and sanctification of marriage among covenant than standard couples.

Covenant Marriage as a Three-pronged Signal Covenant couples believe that the covenant distinction conveys three important signals to each other and to the external world. All the covenant couples mentioned at least one of the three in their interviews. First, covenant marriage serves as a strong signal to one’s partner of one’s intentions as a faithful, committed spouse and servant of God. Second, covenants use their marriages to signal to others that their personal commitment is of a higher standard and that, for them, divorce will never be an option. Thus, covenants signal their intention to strengthen marriage in their communities. Finally,

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for the previously divorced, and particularly for husbands who were emotionally devastated by those divorces, covenant marriage serves to manage anxiety about the chances of another divorce. Signaling Credible Spousal Commitment and Honor to Your Partner First and foremost, covenants feel that their vows signal their seriousness to their partners and their fidelity to God, both necessary signals in a culture seen as devaluing such things. As the young seminarian noted, covenant marriage “was the most public thing offered to us to show how extreme our commitment was.” A working-class, disabled covenant wife noted, “Divorce is so easy now. Marriage is so easy now. You can get married and get divorced so easy. God is never going to leave us; and maybe that’s what He’s trying to say in a covenant marriage. You’ll never leave each other. No matter what, you’ll never walk out. You’ll just never make it that easy.” The young janitor husband and father talked about his covenant commitment: I think that it is sad that we had to make sure that this is a covenant marriage. Because that is what marriage is, it is a covenant, and it should not be broken. We take that very seriously, I take it very seriously, because going back to our relationship with God, I think he’s the one that created man and woman. He set that in motion, and that is how it is supposed to be. So, he has given us that pleasure in partaking in this marriage. Save each other for each other, one man and woman for each other. For all of life, and just share in life and in your children, it is a take on what God intends, and I think that is very important. I do not take it lightly. When I made those vows, when I stood there and got married, it was very serious, and I knew what I was doing.

Covenant marriage is also a powerful and useful signal of the sanctity of marriage and spousal responsibilities. A wife, explaining the value of covenant marriage, said, “I don’t want to do things that would intentionally hurt my marriage. I don’t want to hurt my husband, but then furthermore, I don’t want to hurt God. Because I know that we made that decision to come together before God. So, if we broke it intentionally, I would be breaking it with God.” Thus, most view the covenant choice as tangible evidence of commitment to their spouse and to marriage as an institution, and as an earthly manifestation of their divinely interconnected responsibilities to their spouse, marriage, and God.

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Several spouses also acknowledged that covenant marriage served to remind them of their commitment, particularly in troubling times. One older previously divorced covenant wife in her mid-sixties said jokingly, “We were going to honor [the covenant] no matter what happened, other than us beating each other to death physically.” This couple keeps their covenant marriage license on their refrigerator as a concrete reminder of their commitment. One thirty-one-year-old wife said, “[Covenant marriage] is good for the fact that it just makes you realize that your marriage is forever, because so many people just get married and think, ‘If it doesn’t work out, we’ll just get divorced.’ I like how [covenant marriage] makes you realize that there are other ways to get around your problems rather than divorce.” Another covenant wife in her fifties explained, We thought the covenant would be more biblical, more spiritual, in the sense that we were totally bound to one another to be married and to really make an effort to stay married and to really commit. One time we got into an argument and I looked at him and I was like, “We have a covenant marriage,” you know? “We’ve got to work this out.” It’s just a stronghold in our life that we’ve got a covenant marriage.

For these couples, covenant marriage helps them symbolically lock into their commitment and focus on problem solving and marital coping, rather than dwell on the possibility of separation. Signaling an Intention to Honor and Strengthen Marriage, One Marriage at a Time As the originators of Louisiana’s covenant marriage law intended, the covenant married want to convert couples to a vision of lifelong marriage one couple at a time, beginning with themselves. They see this public signal of their covenant marriage as benefiting their children and society. As one forty-eight-year-old, working-class, covenant husband in his second marriage said, “You know, Rome was torn down from within, not from without. I think the same is true for the United States. Our whole country is built on families, and if we don’t turn our families around then we will be in serious trouble.” One covenant wife said of her children, “I want them to know how it is to be in love and to still be in love no matter how long you’ve been married.” An excellent representation of this philosophy comes from a discussion by a remarried covenant wife in a blended family composed of children

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from both spouses’ previous marriages and one child from their current union. She mentions her concerns about people’s eroded marital standards, lackadaisical, self-serving attitudes about commitment, and complete ignorance about marriage as a sanctified relationship with God: I just think there needs to be more effort to make people aware that [covenant marriage] is available. I believe that a lot of people are looking at it and saying, “No way, if this doesn’t work, I want out.” You know, “This is too hard to get out of.” I believe the standard of our world has gone down to that point. I don’t believe people realize that when they do get married even without a covenant marriage license, they make it a covenant. But covenant, they really don’t know what that is anymore. It doesn’t mean anything to them, it is not legally binding. What’s wrong with legally binding today? They don’t realize that they made a covenant not only with their partner, but with the Lord. And they don’t realize they’re breaking that. People just honestly don’t know anymore. They don’t know anymore. And, unfortunately, it’s not being taught in our churches.

A young husband in another covenant marriage affirmed this philosophy, noting: At first I was like, “Why do I need to sign a piece of paper when I know that in my heart that there is no turning back?” Our standards were so much above that. But we talked about it and we came to the conclusion that we are willing to show how high the commitment is. At first I was like, “My commitment is before God, not necessarily man,” [but we wanted to show] that our standards are higher.

Clearly these couples see their covenant marriage as a public signal that sets them apart from couples who lack a sanctified understanding of commitment to marriage and God. Signaling Safety, Stability, and Trust in a World of Risk Finally, for people with troubled past relationships, especially for emotionally devastated husbands, covenant marriage serves as a very potent signal of trust against the risk of divorce. Those with psychologically damaging divorce experiences see covenant marriage as essential for their ability to take a leap of faith into a new marriage. They talked at length about

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the symbolic benefits of covenant marriage for binding the spouses more permanently, representing a spouse’s intention to submit to God (and the husband), and, most important, creating a space to nurture trust in a relationship in which trust has not yet taken root. Covenant marriage becomes a powerful signal that distinguishes the new marriage from the pain of a previous bad marriage and scathing divorce. As one evidently deeply bothered covenant husband said, [In my first marriage], I never had a say-so whether or not I wanted a divorce or at least go to counseling. You know, and I was willing to go to counseling and try to work it out for the kids. And she was like, “That’s it. I want out.” And so I felt there were two things I wanted. One is, I wanted to have a believer of the same faith as me. And two, to have a covenant marriage, to have at least some type of insurance policy where we would at least attempt to work it out and not just say, “Hey, I’m gone. You don’t have a say-so.”

He has been clear in his explanation to his wife about what covenant marriage means to him. As she says, “His wife hurt him. It devastated him. He’s already told me, he says, ‘You leave me, I will probably just kill myself.’ He can’t cope going through what he went through again. He’s already told me, he said, ‘If you ever have an affair, just don’t even bother coming home.’ So, I think commitment is hard. I think commitment is just hard.” In another case, a woman in a marriage that survived a husband’s arrest for sexual solicitation had wanted a covenant marriage because she felt that her husband had been careless in his first marriage; she was also hurt early in life by her parents’ divorce and her father’s subsequent remarriage three months later. She wanted to signal to her husband that marriage was permanent and that she did not want any “back-and-forth stuff.” Another very young covenant wife and mother mentioned that her husband wanted a covenant marriage because of the pain he suffered as a result of his parents’ divorce. She said that her own family tree had no divorces, so she could not relate to his concerns, but knew that “it was so painful in his childhood and he never wanted his kids to have to go through that or himself or me.”

Conclusion Covenant couples are more religious, attend church and religious events more frequently, and incorporate religiosity more fully into their

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daily routines. They also are much more likely to believe in the sanctity of marriage and to typify divorce as evil. Among the more religious standard couples, spouses are often mismatched and differ in their beliefs, eclectically cobbling together spiritual elements from several strains of thought or denominational experiences. Covenant marriage also has significance as a multifaceted signal. Foremost, covenant marriage serves as a marker of maturity and commitment. It also signals the couple’s civic impulse to strengthen marriage and fight the forces that weaken what they see as God’s plans for families. For those shaken in faith or confidence by past divorce, covenant marriage signals trust. These latter individuals use covenant marriage as a symbolic means to “clean the slate” and enter a new marriage untainted and untouched by previous failures. In short, covenant-married individuals are mindful and aware of the signaling functions of their choice. They use their covenant marriages to convey messages to each other and to the larger community. These findings seem to indicate that the covenant marriage option has uniformly positive effects for these highly religious, evangelical, and usually fundamentalist couples. After all, covenant marriage provides a concrete language to describe their perceptions of the symbolic relationship between their marriage, God, and society. On the other hand, this intense focus on the covenant status of their marriage may have unintended negative effects in some cases. We did find some evidence of marital problems exacerbated by religiosity among a few covenant couples in our interviews. An extreme example is the working-class couple in which both spouses are remarried and the husband wanted a covenant marriage because he had experienced an unwanted divorce. This husband envisions an angry, stalking God, one who directed him into a near-fatal highway truck accident in order to “put him on his knees” and wake him up about his sinful, drunken nature. This rigidly fundamentalist husband banished his new wife’s teenage daughter from their home because he considers her an ungodly sinner. He also placed many restrictions on his disabled wife, expecting her to maintain exacting cleaning and cooking standards and to nurse his elderly mother, whom he moved into their home without consultation. He restricts her access to money and prohibits her from being alone with any man, including service-repair people. He prohibits any Sunday market activity, including shopping for necessities or dining at restaurants with friends or family. He criticizes his wife often and publicly for her poor appearance,

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poor faculties, and failings as a wife. He expects his convictions, no matter how difficult, to be her convictions as well. His unrelenting criticism has left her bewildered and unsure of herself, her God, and her marriage. Reflecting on her struggles to submit to her husband, and her mounting inner turmoil and rebellion, she stated, “There are just some people, religiously, that they’re just happy. They’re just joyous. They’re just exuberant. They’re just excited. And I’m like, ‘What is wrong with these people?’” She believes that she has a “heart of garbage,” and that she is now far removed from the time when her husband first “chose” her and she felt like they were the “king and queen of [their] church.” His interpretations of fundamentalism and covenant marriage are a torment to his wife and disruptive to their marriage. This case aside, we mainly interviewed covenant couples who perceive benefits more than costs to covenant marriage. They focus on mutual respect for each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and a strong interest in marriage education and enrichment. Spouses commonly share a lively engagement with each other’s ideas, opinions, and feelings, and a tender fondness for each other’s basic humanity. They report a benevolent appraisal of God’s covenant with them, usually explaining that God wants their joy and prosperity. Clearly, these couples derive gratification and a sense of empowerment from the civic service they believe that they provide with the example of their covenant marriage. It is important to recognize that, legally, covenant marriage is an emergent alternative family form, brought to light by legal reforms. Very few individuals choose, or even know about, covenant marriage. But it is clear that for those who chose it, the form of marriage mattered. It helped them convey an important message to their partner, as well as to the larger community. This, of course, was one of the intended effects when covenant marriage was introduced. Our findings, therefore, have intriguing implications for public policy generally. A signaling perspective may be useful in studying other emergent alternative family forms, such as cohabitation, or even gay marriage. In fact, covenant marriage and gay marriage may, enigmatically, have parallels that could be seen from a signaling perspective. For example, both covenant and gay marriage advocates want a signal to express and validate how society would benefit from their marriages. Covenant marriage law, then, serves as part of a public and personal identity for those who select it. Whether it is effective in helping couples find compatible partners and convincing others to follow their lead are the larger questions for policy makers to answer. Evidence for the former would be found in

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higher-quality marriages and lower divorce rates among covenant couples. Evidence for the latter would be found in growing numbers of couples getting covenant marriages. In the following chapters, we show that covenant couples enjoy better marriages and lower divorce rates, both driven primarily by their greater shared religiosity. We find no evidence, however, for an expanding interest in covenant marriage.

Chapter 6

The Ongoing Marriage

Y T

he first few years of marriage demand changes and adjustments for most couples. Partners need to reconcile their individual beliefs and concerns and coordinate their public lives and responsibilities. Not only are the partners different individuals, each with personal values and beliefs, but they are also members of various formal and informal organizations such as work, hobbies, clubs, and congregations. Somehow, all these individual differences and commitments must be united into a harmonious, functioning whole. Some couples manage to merge their lives without much difficulty, but others face significant challenges, and often fail. Although the “merger challenge” is something couples must negotiate throughout their married lives, it is typically most demanding in the first few years, when there are fewer patterns, traditions, or tested strategies on which to rely. With time, married people typically settle into routines and come to rely on solutions that have worked for them in the past. But until they do, partners must either experiment with novel solutions, try those used by others, or rely on some guiding principle or philosophy to inform their decisions and choices. Marriage involves fewer choices than living together because marriage comes with traditions and customs. Whether to be cordial to a partner’s mother, for example, is much less of a puzzle for husbands than boyfriends. This chapter considers how couples in both types of marriages change over the first five or six years of their marriage. Do their marriages appear to get better, or worse? We assess this by measuring changes in five aspects of marital quality, as explained in the next section. We also ask whether covenant and standard marriages change in the same ways and for the same reasons. Was it because some couples had weathered more strains to their marriage, or perhaps they had more education, which has been shown to influence marriage? Perhaps they were older. In these comparisons, we must keep in mind that covenant couples differ in important ways from their 98

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standard counterparts even before they marry. Therefore, changes in their marriages may reflect those preexisting differences, or they may reflect something about covenant marriage, per se. To the extent possible, we try to investigate these two possibilities.

Measures of Marital Adjustment In our attempt to determine how couples manage these fi rst few years of marriage, we considered three central areas of married life: the quality of their relationship over time; how spouses envision their future together; and their thoughts about their own chances of divorce. We believe that significant negative change in any one of these dimensions is evidence of possible problems. More detail on all aspects of this research is found in appendix D. Marital Quality Four dimensions are widely regarded as fundamentals of marriage quality. We relied on the Dyadic Adjustment Scale developed by Spanier in 1976. Details about the measures are found in appendix D. First is consensus, or the extent of agreement between partners on the essential aspects of married adult life. We considered agreement between partners in matters of finances, religion, in-laws, friends, the division of household labor, and seven other issues (details in appendix D). The second dimension of adjustment is the degree of satisfaction each partner has with various aspects of the marriage. We asked each partner to tell us how often (ranging from “all the time” to “never”) he or she did eight different things (including thinking that things are going well in the marriage, considering ending the marriage, kissing his or her partner, leaving the house after a fight, confiding in his or her partner, or getting on each others’ nerves). The third dimension is cohesion and refers to togetherness, or the extent to which couples engage in activities as a pair. Each partner was asked how often he or she does each of five things with the partner (such as sharing outside interests, calmly discussing an issue, or working together on a project). The fourth dimension is affection and the couple’s sense of their agreement about it. We asked each partner to tell us how often they agree on showing affection, their sex life, and showing love. In addition to these four dimensions, we also considered fairness (measured here by the relative responsibilities each partner has for maintaining

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the household). Perceptions of unfairness in a marriage increase the chances of divorce more so than the actual work division (for example, who does what) (Nock and Brinig 2002). We relied on past research to guide us in investigating fairness (Sweet, Bumpass, and Call 1988). The Future Together The second aspect of marriage we consider is how couples imagine their futures together. Marriages typically include an “until death do us part” vow. Obviously, not all marriages make it. How partners imagine their future, we believe, is a good measure of how they experience their present (and their past). Even if circumstances at the moment are problematic, those who still imagine a bright future are likely to experience their problems as less challenging. Over the course of the first five years, however, we have found that people change their views about their shared future and that of their marriages. We therefore asked partners to tell us where their marriage would stand in five years. We also asked each partner how much he or she agreed with the statement “Our best times together will be in the future.” Thoughts About Divorce We were interested to learn how each partner viewed the chances of divorce, and how he or she imagined various aspects of life (such as standard of living, social life, happiness, and sex life) would change if the couple separated or divorced. For each topic, the individual indicated whether this aspect of life would get worse or better. We refer to this as the “benefits of divorce” in our discussions that follow. Our second question about divorce asked each partner to estimate the realistic chances they will ever divorce (from very low to very high).

Factors that Influence Marital Adjustment The next question was what factors or conditions influence these three central aspects of married life. Following past research (see Casper and Bianchi 2002 for a review), we compare personal characteristics, stressors, and values and beliefs between standard and covenant couples. Personal characteristics include age, race, and education. Older and younger spouses, for example, differ in how they experience marriage and how they deal with challenges. The same is true of better- and less-educated individuals (Umberson et al. 2005). These are the issues that are typically “controlled” in most studies of marriage.

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Several events can strain a marriage. The most obvious is the arrival of children (LaRossa 1986; Rogers and White 1998; Umberson et al. 2005). When partners become parents, they quickly discover that old routines must be changed and that most aspects of ordinary life must be altered to accommodate the needs of their child. The husband-wife relationship must be adjusted to include the father-mother relationship. Therefore, we assessed the number of preschool-aged children (age five and younger) in the household. The demands for income and of work are also potential stressors for individuals and couples. Particularly difficult is the balancing of home and work. When income cannot meet needs, couples struggle with extra jobs, reduced consumption, and erratic schedules (Matthews et al. 1998; White and Rogers 2000). Income, as we study it, refers to what the individual earned last year, and not the combined income of both spouses. We experimented with the latter but found personal income to be a better predictor of change. The same is true of the number of hours spent at paid employment in the prior week. Finally, the personal or shared values, or philosophy, of individuals are known to influence marriage. Religious beliefs and practices, for example, influence marital quality (Booth et al. 1995). Religion has also been found to have strong effects on the way parents respond to their children (Wilcox 1998). Therefore, we considered religious practices, both individually but also with one’s partner. We wanted to capture the degree to which religion is central to the individual and couple’s life. We combine questions about how often the couple attends religious services, whether they attend services together, how frequently they pray, and the importance of their religious faith. We considered many other measures of religion and spent two years investigating alternative ways to represent it. Many things led us to the current measure. First, these items coalesce (average coefficient alpha = .770 at wave 1) better than any other combination. Second, because our focus is on how things may change, it is important that our measures actually have the possibility of changing with time. For that reason, questions about whether the couple met at a religious event or location, childhood religious experiences, or religious denomination (which virtually never changed in our study) were not included in this measure. Third, there were very few missing values on these items. Finally, this simple measure correlates very highly with all other measures we have investigated. Another value or belief found to influence marriage is ideas about gender. Do husbands believe that wives should “behave” in a certain way?

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Do they think that wives should care for the home while husbands earn the living? And do wives agree with such views? (Amato and Booth 1995). To gauge one’s position on issues of gender, we developed a scale that measures the degree to which individuals endorse traditional views about the role of women (and men) in marriage in areas such as full-time employment, responsibility for the home, and children. Finally, we examined how strong the couple’s “marriage culture” was by examining to what degree individuals embrace a traditional view of marriage, its importance in life, and its norms. Facing day-to-day challenges without any guiding principles or philosophy can challenge a marriage. Marriages, therefore, are more likely to survive when couples can rely on traditional solutions to customary problems. To assess this shared culture and belief, we assembled questions about the centrality of marriage in life: whether a man or woman could be “complete” without being married, the importance of marriage for life, the connection of children and marriage, the lifelong commitment implied by marriage vows, and the significance of the wedding vows. We also asked couples whether they understand marriage as an unbreakable covenant with God. The more strongly individuals agreed with the traditional views expressed in these statements, the more we believe they embrace this traditional view of marriage. If both partners strongly endorse such a view of marriage, we assumed they would find it easier to cope with the challenges of merging their lives in marriage. The simple correlation between the measure of traditional views of marriage and of religiousness is .40 for women, and .36 for men. This means that the two sets of values and beliefs are related (the more one endorses one, the more they are likely to endorse the other). Still, the majority of people differ significantly on the two. In other words, these are related dimensions of individual beliefs and practices, but they are not the same thing (which would produce correlations closer to 1.0). In the following sections, we present two sets of results. First, we present our findings about differences in marital quality at the outset of marriage, and then we show how and why marital adjustment changes over the next five or six year. We also present all results separately for men and women. Appendix D also includes a detailed discussion of the statistical methods and measures. We analyzed the evidence from men and women separately for two reasons. First, the number of marriages for whom both partners provided adequate information over all three waves (“complete couples”) is considerably smaller than is the number who, themselves, provided adequate

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information over the course of five years. Restricting our analysis to only those for whom both partners provided complete information restricts our sample unnecessarily. Second, our preliminary analysis on complete couples, in which husband’s characteristics were studied for how they influenced wives, and vice versa, revealed very few significant effects. Where such effects were found, they were quite small and substantively unimportant. This is not surprising given that our questions were designed to tap dimensions of the relationship as well as personal issues. In other words, we designed our questionnaires to allow us to investigate marriages even when we had only one partner’s responses. So for practical and analytical reasons, we focus on each partner separately in the following sections.

Differences in the First Few Months We begin by asking how marital adjustment differs among newly married individuals, or in other words, how the various influences on marital quality, thoughts of the future, and thoughts about divorce operate early in the marriage. After considering how the marriages began, we move on to consider how they change. The complete results for the beginnings of marriage are found in the first panel (top half) of table 6.1. Remember that all the factors that might influence couples at the beginning of their marriages are known to distinguish covenant from standard spouses. We present the results in a way that permits us to compare one variable with another, either across the various outcomes, between the sexes, or across the various factors. Every value in table 6.2 shows the effect of a one standard deviation change of a factor in terms of the fraction of a standard deviation change it produces in the outcome. A standard deviation is the average difference between the mean and the scores that produce it. It is the average amount of difference among individuals around the average values. All outcome measures have been normed to range from 0 to 1.0. These results for the beginning of marriage are similar to what researchers obtain when they conduct a standard multiple regression analysis. The coefficients reflect differences among individuals. All coefficients in table 6.2 are expressed as the effect of changing the independent variable by 1.0 standard deviations. They are, in other words, effect sizes. The two types of couples clearly differ at the outset of their marriages. This conclusion is based on the simple relationship between each measure of marital adjustment (thoughts about the future or thoughts about divorce) and the type of marriage. It is not shown in table 6.2. When nothing else

Baseline Covenant (1=Y, 0=No) Education (years) Religiousness (scale 1.0-5.0) Centrality of marriage (scale 1.0-5.0) Gender traditionalism (scale 1.0-5.0) Hours worked last week Black Other Preschoolers (1=Yes, 0 = N0) 2.21 0.25 0.61 0.72 16.36 1 1 1

2.48 0.23

0.57

0.76

15.07 1 1 1

-0.098**

-0.158** -0.280 -0.709** -0.453* -0.282**

0.057

0.114**

-0.121 -0.688** 0.008 -0.304**

0.019 0.137**

-0.020 0.132**

-0.068

0.907***

0.056

0.816***

0.805***

1

1

W

H

W

-0.031 -0.140 -0.197 -0.385* -0.385**

-0.136** -0.108* -0.200** 0.086 -0.271**

0.010

-0.076** 0.090*

-0.159*** 0.090** 0.143**

0.103

0.851***

H

0.117

.834

-0.050

0.14

0.117

0.125

.845

SD=W SD=H

.840

Affection

.832

Satisfaction

-0.089* -0.320** 0.041** -0.183*

-0.094**

0.074**

-0.044* 0.140***

0.012

0.773***

W

0.169

.790

-0.151** -0.361** -0.287 -0.306**

-0.093**

0.023

-0.020 0.192**

0.056

0.781***

H

0.108

.784

Consensus

-0.021** -0.068** -0.061** -0.073**

-0.014**

0.046**

-0.017** 0.001

-0.015

0.883***

W

0.672

.684

-0.022** -0.121** -0.097** -0.091**

-0.018**

0.023**

-0.022** 0.002

-0.001

0.661***

H

0.793

.695

Cohesion

Factors That Influence the Quality of Marriage and Thoughts of Divorce

MEAN

Table 6.1

-0.115** -0.273** 0.153 -0.247**

-0.145**

0.099*

-0.081** 0.133**

0.008

0.816***

W

0.92

3.97

-0.052 -0.433** -0.435** -0.337**

0.002

0.038

-0.039 0.033

-0.108

0.805***

H

0.63

4.05

Fair to Me

*

p