What Is the God-Given Purpose for Marriage?

Marriage is for the benefit of the children, and married parents can strengthen their family, community, state, and nation. According to “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” “marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God.” The document also states that “the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of his children.” Later in the doctrine, it states the following: 

The family is ordained of God. Marriage between man and woman is essential to his eternal plan. Children are entitled to birth within the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother who honor marital vows with complete fidelity. Happiness in family life is most likely to be achieved when founded upon the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ….

The above referenced proclamation was published by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and signed by fifteen men who are sustained as prophets, seers, and revelators. That is one side of the discussion. On the opposite side of the discussion are the people and organizations who seek to deconstruct marriage and family.

Patrick T. Brown, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, discussed the problem in an article published at The Daily Signal. He noted that “Center-left media outlets” look for interesting ways to find some “new ‘trend’ in the upper-middle-class mating scene.” In the past, such terms as “Ethical nonmonogamy,” “polyamory memoirs,” and “Couple to Throuple” gained respectful reviews. 

After all, once society has deconstructed marriage down to the point of meaninglessness, why should we have any compunction about celebrating such creative alternatives to bourgeois fidelity? If Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice want to go all in on creating a modern-day polycule, what difference does that make to us?

The push to unwind traditional social scripts around marriage, fidelity, commitment, and procreation hasn’t just been a question of individual fulfillment, but also has had widespread social consequences.

That’s the argument made by Washington Examiner commentary editor and former Senate staffer Conn Carroll in his new book, “Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage Is Destroying Democracy.”

Carroll takes the reader on a globe-trotting tour across the ages, dipping into evolutionary psychology, anthropology, and history to make the case that “monogamous marriage binds men and women into a long-term project of cooperative care for each other and their children,” and that we tinker with that wisdom at our peril.

The casual reader’s mileage may vary on how much academic speculation about the mating habits of primates or our Pleistocene-era ancestors can tell us about the form and structure of what family life should look like today. But Carroll’s dissection of how modern liberals and leftists try to justify their preference for maximum autonomy by appealing to prehistoric biology and postmodern critical theory is worth taking seriously.

And the anthropological excursions are in service of a broader point: namely, that marriage is instituted for the well-being of children, not the two (or more) consenting adults that would enter into it. As former Heritage Foundation scholar (and my current boss) Ryan T. Anderson pointed out in 2013:

“State recognition of marriage protects children by encouraging men and women to commit to each other and take responsibility for their children. While respecting everyone’s liberty, government rightly recognizes, protects, and promotes marriage as the ideal institution for childbearing and childrearing … [yet] in recent decades, marriage has been weakened by a revisionist view that is more about adults’ desires than children’s needs.”

The cultural and legal skirmish that ended in Obergefell v. Hodges was just one form of attempting to redefine marriage around adult companionship, rather than being the institution properly ordered toward the bearing and rearing of children.

Marriage is no longer about how best to order society to support the children male-female romantic partnerships inevitably produce, and is instead about increasingly surpassing the bounds of tradition and biology in the name of autonomy….

Some left-wing activists don’t just want to abolish the gender binary when it comes to self-expression. They’d like to see the entire idea of the binary relationship at the heart of parenthood blown up and replaced with one of “chosen family.”

We see this in the push to replace or erase a child’s biological parents on birth certificates, robbing them of not just information about their biological ancestry, but potential information about their genetic predisposition to certain diseases….

The cultural trends that Carroll traces didn’t happen overnight. Restoring marriage may well take decades, if not longer, but can be accelerated through sound economic policies.

After all, the familiar wreckage he highlights from marriage decline – more children raised in unstable homes, depressed rates of economic mobility, higher levels of loneliness and social isolation, rising opioid deaths, falling birth rates – are too important to shrug our shoulders at.

Seeing marriage as something more than simply one life choice among others – that is, more than just serial cohabitation that starts with a blowout party on a Caribbean island somewhere – would go a long way to restoring a popular understanding of family as the cornerstone of a healthy society.

“Sex and the Citizen” is a welcome contribution to these discussions, and Carroll’s point – that marriage has an inevitable social dimension, not just an individual one – is one that more conservatives should understand and apply to debates about how to best to save America in the years ahead.

God ordained marriage for the benefit of children. In the words of the proclamation, God will hold us accountable if we “violate covenants of chastity,” “abuse spouse or offspring,” or “fail to fulfill family responsibilities.” The proclamation also warns that “the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.”