Brad Wilcox – Tony Lusvardi, S.J.

A couple of years ago I taught a seminar on the sacrament of marriage, using Mark Regnerus’s excellent book The Future of Christian Marriage, which I reviewed for the Homiletic and Pastoral Review. I taught the same seminar again this past semester and reviewed another recent contribution to the subject, Brad Wilcox’s Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization (Broadside Books, 2024). You can read the review below or visit HRP and read it again!

Marriage is among the most important social justice issues of our day. Classic Catholic social teaching—think Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum—has long recognized the connection between social well-being and a family life built on marriage. As Brad Wilcox points out in Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, “questions of marriage and family” are better predictors of positive or negative social outcomes than “race, education, and government spending” (xiv). Yet even in Catholic circles, questions of marriage and sexual ethics are often treated not as issues of pressing social concern, but as matters of private morality—or dismissed as “cultural issues.”

Such dismissiveness has little theological basis. And Wilcox—a professor of sociology and the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia—demonstrates that it is even harder to justify from a sociological point of view. Marriage is good both for society as a whole—a higher percentage of married parents correlates with lower child poverty (73)—and for individuals, both men and women, who report higher rates of happiness, find more meaning in their lives, and are less lonely than their unmarried—and childless—peers (51-52, 115, 121).