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ORK TITLE: oul
oul Mates
WORK NOTES: with Nicholas Wolfinger
PSEUDONYM(S): Wilcox, Brad
BIRTHDATE: 8/21/1970
WEBSITE: http://www.wbradfordwilcox.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://sociology.virginia.edu/people/faculty/bradford-wilcox * http://sociology.virginia.edu/sites/sociology.virginia.edu/files/Wilcox.W.CV_15-16.pdf * http://nationalmarriageproject.org/wordpress/about/director/ * https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/people/w-bradford-wilcox
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born August 21, 1970; married.
EDUCATION:University of Virginia, graduated; Princeton University, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Sociologist, educator, and writer. University of Virginia, Charlottesville, professor of sociology; National Marriage Project, director.
MEMBER:James Madison Society.
AWARDS:Best Article Award, American Sociological Association.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Journal of Marriage and Family, and Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.
SIDELIGHTS
W. Bradford Wilcox is a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia. He has written and edited or coedited a number of books, and he is also the director of the National Marriage Project.
Soft Patriarchs, New Men
In his 2004 book Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands, Wilcox explores the intersections between societal structures and religious faith. In particular, the author focuses on the ways in which the Christian faith has shaped patriarchy, and he finds that it has helped create a “soft” patriarch–that is, a “domesticated” male who marries, stays at home, and raises a family. The author asserts that liberal Protestants in particular have advanced egalitarian family units, in which husband and wife share power. Conservative Protestant groups, on the other hand, promote a more “traditional” model, with the male as head of household.
As Darren E. Sherkat remarked in his Social Forces assessment of the book, “Wilcox’s review of the literature on empirical connections between religion and family is limited, and sweeping generalizations are often supported with references to activist commentary rather than scientific inquiry.” Furthermore, “Wilcox’s thesis gives primacy to the causal power of beliefs, yet he does not provide a systematic rendering of conservative or liberal Christian belief structures regarding family.” A more positive assessment was offered by Charlotte Allen in First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, as she announced, “Wilcox has not written a religious or political polemic here but rather a scrupulously even-handed report, basing his conclusions on his statistical analysis of three large-scale national surveys of U.S. adults’ social attitudes conducted from the late 1980s through the ’90s.” Allen added: “Wilcox’s aim is clearly to engage his sociological confreres as well as the public at large; thus he lays out his case in such a careful and dispassionate manner that many lay readers are likely to find his book, with its many pages of endnotes and its numerous regression tables, colorless and dull, although its conclusions are anything but that.”
Soul Mates
Wilcox went on to team with fellow sociologist Nicholas H. Wolfinger to write Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos. Both sociologists have a background studying marriage and family structures, and they apply this lens to African American and Latino communities. Noting that these communities have different marriage and divorce rates than white communities, the authors set out to explore why these different rates exist. Wilcox and Wolfinger conduct group interviews, draw on national data sets, and conduct long-term studies to explore issues of sex, love, and religion, and they consider how each factor influences attitudes toward marriage and divorce in their subjects’ lives.
Online Reading Religion correspondent Nikki Young remarked, “I find Wilcox and Wolfinger’s exploration in Soul Mates an intriguing—albeit heterosexually focused—contribution to discourse on American families. Smartly researched and coherently written, their text offers insight into the shifting landscape of relationships within communities that experience significant external pressures and face systematic oppression. This concentrated study on minoritized relational practices results in an informed description of the religious resources positively impacting African American and Latino communities.” Peter Wehner, writing in the National Review, was also impressed, as he announced: “Analyzing the crack-up of the American family, including families among minority groups, is not a ground-breaking effort; scholars have been doing it for decades, and Wilcox and Wolfinger rely on many of them in their book. But what is a genuinely new contribution is the book’s examination of the role faith plays in shaping relationships, marriage, and family life.” Wehner found that “Wilcox and Wolfinger repeatedly remind us that religion is no silver bullet. For instance, religion does not seem to have any impact on marital stability for blacks and Latinos (religious attendance does not reduce the divorce rate for either group, even as it substantially reduces divorce among whites). But overall there’s no denying that religion is a force for good in African-American and Latino family life.”
Another positive assessment appeared in Commentary, as Naomi Schaefer Riley advised that “the authors go to great pains to show that they have not approached their subject from a particular political perspective—Wilcox describes himself as a married, conservative, religious person, while Wolfinger is single, liberal, and secular. For every cultural argument they offer for the problems of the family, they advance an economic one. They are always sure to suggest that racism, segregation, or even the historic legacy of slavery could be among the causes of the problems they see.” Riley continued: “The real contribution of Soul Mates comes in its analysis of the marital habits of blacks and Latinos and how religious life has and has not affected them. The first set of statistics that stand out are the ones regarding infidelity. Twenty-nine percent of black women report ‘infidelity or suspected infidelity’ in their relationships, compared with 22 percent of Latina women and 7 percent of white women. And those are among the ones who are married. When one looks at partnerships among never-married adults, the patterns become even more stark.” Proffering commendation in Choice, B. Weston declared that Soul Mates is a “readable book” that “will be the standard academic reference on this subject for some time to come.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Books & Culture, January-February, 2016, Anna Sutherland, review of Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos.
Choice, August, 2013, A.H. Koblitz, review of Whither the Child? Causes and Consequences of Low Fertility, p. 2275; August, 2013, B. Weston, review of Gender and Parenthood: Biological and Social Scientific Perspectives, p. 2273; June, 2016, B. Weston, review of Soul Mates, p. 1549.
Commentary, February, 2016, Naomi Schaefer Riley, review of Soul Mates, p. 49.
First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, March, 2005, Charlotte Allen, review of Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands.
National Review, February 29, 2016, Peter Wehner, review of Soul Mates.
Reference & Research Book News, February, 2013, review of Whither the Child?
Social Forces, September, 2005, Darren E. Sherkat, review of Soft Patriarchs, New Men.
ONLINE
Georgetown University Web site, http://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/ (April 25, 2017), author profile.
National Marriage Project Web site, http://nationalmarriageproject.org/ (April 25, 2017), author profile.
Reading Religion, http://readingreligion.org/ (August 30, 2016), Nikki Young, review of Soul Mates.
University of Virginia Web site, https://sociology.virginia.edu/ (April 25, 2017), author profile.
W. Bradford Wilcox Home Page, http://www.wbradfordwilcox.com (April 25, 2017).
Brad Wilcox is Director of the National Marriage Project and Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, and a member of the James Madison Society at Princeton University.
He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia and his Ph.D. at Princeton University. Prior to coming to the University of Virginia, he held research fellowships at Princeton University, Yale University and the Brookings Institution.
Brad Wilcox’s research focuses on marriage, parenthood, and cohabitation, especially on the ways that marriage, gender, and culture influence the quality and stability of family life in the United States and around the globe. He is the coauthor of Gender and Parenthood: Biological and Social Scientific Perspectives (Columbia, 2013, with Kathleen Kovner Kline), Whither the Child?: Causes and Consequences of Low Fertility (Paradigm, 2013, with Eric Kaufmann), and the author of Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands (Chicago, 2004). Wilcox has published articles on marriage, cohabitation, parenting, and fatherhood in The American Sociological Review, Social Forces, The Journal of Marriage and Family and The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. Wilcox is now writing a book with Nicholas Wolfinger titled, Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Children, & Marriage among African Americans and Latinos (Oxford 2014).
For more information on his academic research, please visit the Director's page on the National Marriage Project's website. To view a sample of the media coverage that Brad Wilcox and the National Marriage Project have received, visit the National Marriage Project's media page.
Professor
Curriculum Vitae
W. Bradford Wilcox
PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY
W. Bradford Wilcox is Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and a Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
As an undergraduate, Wilcox was a Jefferson Scholar at the University of Virginia (’92) and later earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University. Prior to coming to the University of Virginia, he held research fellowships at Princeton University, Yale University, and the Brookings Institution.
The coauthor of Gender and Parenthood: Biological and Social Scientific Perspectives (Columbia, 2013, with Kathleen Kovner Kline), Professor Wilcox’s research has focused on marriage, fatherhood, and cohabitation, especially on the ways that family structure, civil society, and culture influence the quality and stability of family life in the United States and around the globe. Now, Dr. Wilcox is exploring the contribution that families make to the economic welfare of individuals and societies. He is also the coauthor of Whither the Child?: Causes and Consequences of Low Fertility (Paradigm, 2013, with Eric Kaufmann) and the author of Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands (Chicago, 2004). Wilcox has published articles on marriage, cohabitation, parenting, and fatherhood in The American Sociological Review, Social Forces, The Journal of Marriage and Family and The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. Wilcox is now writing a book with Nicholas Wolfinger titled, Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Children, & Marriage among African Americans and Latinos (Oxford 2015).
Brad Wilcox has received the following two awards from the American Sociological Association Religion Section for his research: the Best Graduate Paper Award and the Best Article Award. His research has also been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BBC News, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Boston Globe, CNN, The Los Angeles Times, CBS News, NBC's The Today Show, and on NPR. He also writes regularly for publications like The Wall Street Journal.
Bradford Wilcox teaches courses in statistics, family, and religion. You can follow Professor Wilcox @WilcoxNMP.
For his recent popular writings or articles about his work, see:
New York Times , June 2015, "The North-South Divide on Two-Parent Families"
New York Times , June 2013, "Fathers are Not Fungible"
The Atlantic, June 2013, "Unequal, Unfair, and Unhappy: The 3 Biggest Myths About Marriage Today"
Wall Street Journal, March 2013, "The New Unmarried Moms"
Washington Post, November 2012, "Parenting in Red, Blue and Purple America"
The Atlantic, December 2011, " How to Keep Parenthood From Making Your Marriage Miserable"
New York Times, August 2011, "A Shaky Foundation for Families"
New York Times, July 2011, "Marriage Haves and Have-Nots"
New York Times, June 2011, "Why the Ring Matters"
Wall Street Journal, September 2010, "The Generation That Can't Move On Up"
Wall Street Journal, June 2010, "Daddy Was Only a Donor"
CV: http://sociology.virginia.edu/sites/sociology.virginia.edu/files/Wilcox.W.CV_15-16.pdf
W. Bradford Wilcox is Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies.
In his latest work with Nicholas H. Wolfinger, Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage Among African Americans and Latinos (Oxford, 2016), Brad Wilcox shines a much-needed spotlight on the lives of strong and happy minority couples. They find that both married and unmarried minority couples who attend church together are significantly more likely to enjoy happy relationships than black and Latino couples who do not regularly attend. Churches serving these communities, Wilcox and Wolfinger argue, promote a code of decency, encompassing hard work, temperance, and personal responsibility, that benefits black and Latino families.
Professor Wilcox’s research has focused on marriage, fatherhood, and cohabitation, especially on the ways that family structure, civil society, and culture influence the quality and stability of family life in the United States and around the globe. Now, Dr. Wilcox is exploring the contribution that families make to the economic welfare of individuals and societies. He is also the coauthor of Gender and Parenthood: Biological and Social Scientific Perspectives (Columbia, 2013, with Kathleen Kovner Kline), and the author of Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands (Chicago, 2004). Wilcox has published articles on marriage, cohabitation, parenting, and fatherhood in The American Sociological Review, Social Forces, The Journal of Marriage and Family and The Future of Children.
His research has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Slate, National Review Online, NPR, NBC’s The Today Show, and many other media outlets.
As an undergraduate, Wilcox was a Jefferson Scholar at the University of Virginia (’92) and later earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University. Prior to coming to the University of Virginia, he held research fellowships at Princeton University, Yale University, and the Brookings Institution.
For more on his academic research, see:
Google Scholar Search – Brad Wilcox
For his recent popular writings, see:
Don’t be a bachelor: Why married men work harder, smarter and make more money
Knot Now: The benefits of marrying in your mid-to-late 20s (including more sex!)
Why so many empty church pews? Here’s what money, sex, divorce and TV are doing to American religion
Family Matters
Men and Women Often Expect Different Things When They Move In Together
The Distinct, Positive Impact of a Good Dad
Fathers Are Not Fungible
When Two Traditions Wed
How To Keep Parenthood from Making Your Marriage Miserable
Closing the book on open marriage
Marriage: The Next Chapter
Sex and the married American
Why the Ring Matters
The Generation That Can’t Move On Up
Daddy Was Only a Donor
Can the Recession Save Marriage?
A Shaky Foundation for Families
Working Papers:
No Money, No Honey, No Church (pdf)
Follow Brad Wilcox on Twitter @WilcoxNMP
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W. Bradford Wilcox
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
W. Bradford Wilcox
Born William Bradford Wilcox
1970
Fields Sociology
Institutions University of Virginia
Alma mater University of Virginia (B.A. 1992), Princeton University (Ph.D. 2001)
William Bradford Wilcox (born 1970) is an associate professor of sociology and the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. He is also a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies,[1] and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.[2]
Contents
1 Background
2 Publications
3 In the Media
4 Testimony
5 Controversy
6 Selected Bibliography
6.1 Books
6.2 Articles
6.3 Reports
7 References
8 External links
Background
Wilcox has a bachelor's degree from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. He held research fellowships at Princeton University, Yale University, and the Brookings Institution before joining the faculty of the University of Virginia, where he is an associate professor and director of graduate studies. His sociological research centers on marriage, fatherhood, and cohabitation, particularly on how family structure, civil society, and culture affect the quality and stability of family life, and the ways families shape the economic outcomes of individuals and societies. He teaches undergraduate- and graduate-level courses on statistics, family, and religion.[3]
Publications
Wilcox has authored and edited several books, and published numerous articles on marriage, fatherhood, parenting, and religion. His work has appeared in such leading academic journals as The American Sociological Review, Social Forces,[4] and The Journal of Marriage and Family.[5] His latest book, Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love, & Marriage among African Americans and Latinos (with coauthor Nicholas Wolfinger) was published by Oxford University Press in 2016. His first book, Soft Patriarchs and New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2004. In addition, Wilcox has co-edited two books: Gender and Parenthood: Biological and Social Scientific Perspectives (with Kathleen Kovner Kline, Columbia University Press, 2013) and Whither the Child? Causes and Consequences of Low Fertility (with Eric Kaufmann, Paradigm Press, 2013).
He has published articles in more popular venues as well, such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Review, and The Weekly Standard. As director of the National Marriage Project, Wilcox also oversees the publication of an annual report on marriage in America, entitled The State of Our Unions.[6]
In the Media
Wilcox’s research on marriage, religion, and family life has been featured in The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today, Slate, Huffington Post,[7] National Review Online, National Journal,[8] National Public Radio, The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, NBC’s Today Show, and numerous other media outlets. His work is also regularly cited in academic publications.[9]
Testimony
In May 2014, Wilcox spoke along with several other experts at a meeting convened by the United Nations as part of the 20th Anniversary of the International Year of the Family. His topic was "The Family in Transition: Should We Be Concerned About Declines in Fertility and Marriage?"[10]
Additionally, in February 2015, Wilcox testified before the House Ways and Means Committee's Subcommittee on Human Resources about the challenges low-income families face in today's economy.[11]
Controversy
In July 2012 a newly published study titled "How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Study"[12] prompted much criticism regarding its methodology and allegations that it was influenced by two politically conservative organizations that helped fund the study.[13] Later, James Wright, editor of Social Science Research, identified Paul Amato and W. Bradford Wilcox as two of the three anonymous peer reviewers who vetted the scientific methodology of this study.[14]
Selected Bibliography
Books
Soft Patriarchs and New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands, The University of Chicago Press, 2004
Gender and Parenthood: Biological and Social Scientific Perspectives, Columbia University Press, 2013
Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love, & Marriage among African Americans and Latinos, Oxford University Press, 2016
Articles
"Marriage as a Matter of Social Justice", The Atlantic, 2015
"Obama should have talked about marriage", USA Today, 2014
"Marriage Makes Our Children Richer—Here's Why", The Atlantic, 2013
"Marriage Haves and Have Nots", The New York Times, 2011
"Sex and the Married American", The Washington Post, 2011
"Daddy Was Only a Donor", The Wall Street Journal, 2010
"The Generation That Can't Move On Up" (with Andrew J. Cherlin), The Wall Street Journal, 2010
"Five Myths on Fathers and Family", National Review, 2009
"The Evolution of Divorce", National Affairs, 2009
"Who's Your Daddy? There's more to fatherhood than donating DNA", The Weekly Standard, 2005
"Religion and the Domestication of Men", Contexts (American Sociological Review), 2006
Reports
Knot Yet: The Benefits and Costs of Delayed Marriage in America, 2013
The President's Marriage Agenda for the Forgotten Sixty Percent, Editor and contributor, 2012
When Baby Makes Three: How Parenthood Makes Life Meaningful and How Marriage Makes Parenthood Bearable (with Elizabeth Marquardt), 2011
When Marriage Disappears: The Retreat from Marriage in Middle America, 2010
W. Bradford Wilcox is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies. He is Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and a member of the James Madison Society at Princeton University.
Professor Wilcox’s research has focused on marriage, fatherhood, and cohabitation, especially on the ways that family structure, civil society, and culture influence the quality and stability of family life in the United States and around the globe. His research has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Slate, National Review Online, NPR, NBC’s The Today Show, and many other media outlets. He has also published articles on marriage, cohabitation, parenting, and fatherhood in The American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Journal of Marriage and Family and Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.
His first book, Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands, (Chicago, 2004) examines the ways in which the religious beliefs and practices of American Protestant men influence their approach to parenting, household labor, and marriage. In his latest work with Nicholas H. Wolfinger, Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage Among African Americans and Latinos (Oxford, 2016), Wilcox shines a much-needed spotlight on the lives of strong and happy minority couples.
Prior to coming to the University of Virginia, he held research fellowships at Princeton University, Yale University and the Brookings Institution. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia and his Ph.D. at Princeton University.
Read the abstract of the paper Professor Wilcox presented for STI's Whither the Child? experts meeting.
Read a summary of Soft Patriarchs.
Read articles he has published in the Wall Street Journal:
To Have, to Hold, for a While
God Will Provide -- Unless the Government Gets There First
The Real Pregnancy Crisis
Can the Recession Save Marriage?
The Generation That Can't Move On Up (with Andrew Cherlin)
Find other articles concerning his studies at:
The Washington Post: Couples Who Share Religious Practices Tend to be Happier Than Those Who Don't
YG Network: Pro-Family Policies. To Strengthen Marriage and Give Kids a Better Shot at the American Dream
W. Bradford Wilcox is Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies. Prior to coming to the University of Virginia, he held research fellowships at Princeton University, Yale University, and the Brookings Institution.
In his latest work with Nicholas Wolfinger, Soul Mates, Brad Wilcox shines a much-needed spotlight on the lives of strong and happy minority couples. They find that both married and unmarried minority couples who attend church together are significantly more likely to enjoy happy relationships than black and Latino couples who do not regularly attend. Churches serving these communities, the authors argue, promote a code of decency, encompassing hard work, temperance, and personal responsibility, that benefits black and Latino families.
His research has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Slate, National Review Online, NPR, NBC’s The Today Show, and many other media outlets.
Love and order
Peter Wehner
68.3 (Feb. 29, 2016): p43.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 National Review, Inc.
http://www.nationalreview.com/
Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos, by W. Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas H. Wolfinger (Oxford, 248 pp., $27.95)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In 2000, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y) was asked to identify the biggest change he had seen in his 40-year political career. Moynihan, a man of unusual wisdom, experience, and perspective, responded this way: "The biggest change, in my judgment, is that family structure has come apart all over the North Atlantic world." This change has occurred in "an historical instant," Moynihan said. "Something that was not imaginable 40 years ago has happened."
In order to help us better understand what has happened and why, two authors with different life experiences and worldviews--W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia (conservative, Catholic, and a married father) and Nicholas Wolfinger of the University of Utah (an unmarried, childless liberal, and a nonbeliever)--have written Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos. As the subtitle implies, Professors Wilcox and Wolfinger discuss the influence exercised by churches on relationships and marriage among blacks and Latinos.
The authors begin the book by discussing the family revolution that has swept across the United States over the last half century, a revolution characterized by unprecedented levels of non-marital childbearing, divorce, single parenthood, and multiple-partner fertility. "Marriage," Wilcox and Wolfinger write, "has been deinstitutionalized as the anchor of the adult life course and of family life itself." This has disproportionately affected Latinos and especially African Americans, the nation's two largest minority groups, who today make up a quarter of the American population and are projected to constitute more than 40 percent of the population in 2050.
In 1970, 57 percent of blacks were married; today, the figure is 25 percent. For Latinos, the corresponding figures are 72 percent and 47 percent. From 1980 to 2011, the percentage of children born outside wedlock rose for blacks from 56 to 72 percent and for Latinos from 24 to 53 percent. (For whites, the figure rose from 9 to 29 percent over the same period.) In 2011, 67 percent of black children, 40 percent of Latino children, and 25 percent of white children lived outside a two-parent, married family.
Wilcox and Wolfinger point out that most African Americans and Latinos will marry at some point in their lives, most of them are married or in a live-in relationship when they have children, and most black and Latino couples are happy and monogamous. Family life for these two groups, they argue, is more positive than some contemporary accounts convey. Yet there's no denying that the retreat from marriage in modern life has disproportionately affected them--and as a result, tremendous hardships have been inflicted on their children in particular. (Children raised in single-parent homes are much more likely to suffer from psychological problems such as depression, get in trouble with the law, live in poverty, and drop out of high school. Their chances of succeeding in life are a lot lower, the challenges they face a lot greater.)
Soul Mates argues that a "confluence of economic, policy, and cultural currents came together with sufficient force in the late 1960s and 1970s to generate a tidal wave of family change"--and African Americans and Latinos were most susceptible to its effects. The explanations, the authors argue, have to do with history, most especially the poisonous effects of slavery, segregation, and other forms of discrimination; with culture, since Latinos and African Americans are more likely to be consumers of popular culture and therefore its messages of hedonism and radical individualism; and with structural issues such as deindustrialization, poverty, incarceration, and poor education. William J. Bennett once pointed out that an earthquake that struck Mexico City in the mid 1980s was less powerful than the one that would hit San Francisco only a few years later. But in Mexico City, the casualties were many times higher and the overall damage much worse. The reason? The amount of devastation often depends less on the magnitude of a quake than on the stability of the structures it affects. This is essentially what Wilcox and Wolfinger argue as to why African-American and Latino families have suffered disproportionately from the aftershocks of the family and sexual revolutions.
Analyzing the crack-up of the American family, including families among minority groups, is not a ground-breaking effort; scholars have been doing it for decades, and Wilcox and Wolfinger rely on many of them in their book. But what is a genuinely new contribution is the book's examination of the role faith plays in shaping relationships, marriage, and family life.
According to Soul Mates, religion is an important bulwark against marital and family decomposition. The data and findings the authors amass are impressive: Religious participation decreases infidelity and out-of-wedlock births and profoundly increases the likelihood that people will marry. Churchgoing Latinos and African Americans are significantly more likely to be gainfully employed, to steer clear of criminal activity or substance abuse, and to be happy compared with their peers who don't attend church or attend only infrequently. According to Wilcox and Wolfinger, religious faith "serves as an important source of personal, familial, and communal strength for many Latinos and especially many African Americans."
Addressing those who claim that what is going on here is self-selection--that family-oriented people seek out religious institutions to reinforce their preexisting orientation toward marriage and family life--the authors argue that the evidence indicates that "the effects of religion are largely causal, and not representative of selection." (The basis for this finding is, in part, controlling for numerous social, demographic, and psychological differences between survey respondents.)
Professors Wilcox and Wolfinger repeatedly remind us that religion is no silver bullet. For instance, religion does not seem to have any impact on marital stability for blacks and Latinos (religious attendance does not reduce the divorce rate for either group, even as it substantially reduces divorce among whites). But overall there's no denying that religion is a force for good in African-American and Latino family life. Religion, for example, "helps sustain Latinos and Blacks in their efforts to be hardworking, temperate, law-abiding members of their communities who steer clear of the temptations of the street."
"Churches foster an ethic of care and reinforce a code of decency among their members," according to Soul Mates. (All of this explodes the silly claim by the late Christopher Hitchens that religion "poisons everything.")
One of the many virtues of this textured, balanced, and sober book is that it interjects compelling human stories to illustrate the authors' empirical findings. For example, we're introduced to Eduardo and Graciela Valdez, a Mexican-American couple from Spanish Harlem who were children of divorce and had experienced fractious family lives. But their faith led them toward marriage.
"This commitment came from that faith in God," Eduardo told the authors. He had faith in marriage "despite all my brokenness, despite all my flaws," he added. Graciela was "the only person that I believe, that I know, that loves ... not just the good Eduardo, but also the broken Eduardo. And I felt called also to do the same thing for her."
Loving another person in his or her brokenness is a beautiful description of what it means to be committed to another person for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do them part. This has never been easy, and in our age--in which relational commitments are increasingly attenuated, contingent, and impermanent; in which what the sociologist Daniel Bell called an ethic of self-expression and self-gratification now dominates--it might be harder than ever. There is a reason scholars refer to our "post-marriage" society.
To restore marriage in 21st-century America will require many things, including public policies that can help on the margins. Soul Mates briefly makes some recommendations, including eliminating marriage penalties and disincentives for the poor and for unwed mothers, expanding the earned-income tax credit, and increasing the child tax credit and funding for proven vocational-education and apprentice programs.
But what is most required to revivify marriage is what is most beyond the power of government to do: reconfigure the order of our loves. A marriage culture will be rebuilt one person at a time, through finding greater fulfillment in self-giving, elevating our affections and desires, and loving others as we love ourselves. None of us does this very well, and all of us could do it much better than we do. Yet for all the moral failures that can be laid at the feet of religion and those acting on its behalf, there is nothing in human history that has helped people improve their character and refine their loves more than faith.
Faith, it has been said, is an anvil that has worn out many hammers. We need it now more than ever, as the hammer of modernity has fractured our most precious human institutions, marriage and family, leaving much human wreckage behind.
Fortunately for those of us who are believers--in my case, a follower of Jesus--there is some comfort in knowing that our faith teaches us that what has been wrecked can also be redeemed.
Mr. Wehner is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wehner, Peter. "Love and order." National Review, 29 Feb. 2016, p. 43+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA443739034&it=r&asid=6731ac75f5277c0f0d342ffdfb9edc3e. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A443739034
Don't take me to church
Naomi Schaefer Riley
141.2 (Feb. 2016): p49.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Jewish Committee
http://www.commentarymagazine.com
Soul Mutes: Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage among-African Americans and Latinos
By W. Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas Wolfinger
Oxford University Press, 218 pages
A HALF century ago, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan was compiling his extensive list of problems contributing to the breakdown of the black family, he included this: "Observers report that the Negro churches have all but lost contact with men in the Northern cities as well. This may be a normal condition of urban life, but it is probably a changed condition for the Negro American and cannot be a socially desirable development."
He reported that the only religious group to whom these men seemed to be gravitating were Black Muslims, "a movement based on total rejection of white society." The loss of church, particularly as a factor helping to teach responsibility and middle-class values to black men, led Moynihan to conclude that "the tangle of pathology is tightening."
It is among the most bitter ironies of this story that the black family experienced a uniquely awful decline even while African Americans remained the most religious group in the country. And while church attendance has typically been a reliable bulwark of marriage and responsible childrearing for white Americans, its effects on blacks in recent years have been much weaker and in some cases nonexistent.
This is among the findings in Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage Among African Americans and Latinos, a new book by sociologists W. Bradford Wilcox at the University of Virginia and Nicholas H. Wolfinger at the University of Utah.
The two begin their book with an account of how changes in the American family have adversely affected all racial groups in America, but blacks and Latinos disproportionately so. "In 1960, only 5 percent of children were born out of wedlock; in 2011, 41 percent of children were," they write. "From 1980 to 2011, the percentage of children born out of wedlock rose for blacks from 56 to 72 percent and for Latinos from 24 to 53 percent; by comparison, for whites it rose from 9 to 29 percent." More than two-thirds of black children lived outside of a married, two-parent family in 2011.
The authors argue that both economic and cultural factors have led to lower rates of marriage, higher rates of divorce and, most important, higher rates of out-of-wedlock childbearing. Scholars such as Andrew Cherlin and Robert Putnam have made the case that the decline in the family was due in large part to the underemployment and falling wages of working-class men in the late '60s and early '70s. Without the skills necessary to earn a good living, non-college-educated men became less desirable marriage partners. Not only that; women's entry into the workforce meant that women needed men's contributions less. Or thought they did.
And that in turn also weakened marriage. As Wilcox and Wolfinger write: "Even as women's labor-force participation began to rival men's they still found themselves doing the lion's share of housework and child care. This threatened marriages by producing more domestic strife. Accordingly, men and women, especially in working class and poor communities where women's relative gains have been strongest, became less likely to get and stay married."
The authors go to great pains to show that they have not approached their subject from a particular political perspective--Wilcox describes himself as a married, conservative, religious person, while Wolfinger is single, liberal, and secular. For every cultural argument they offer for the problems of the family, they advance an economic one. They are always sure to suggest that racism, segregation, or even the historic legacy of slavery could be among the causes of the problems they see. In addition to changing the culture of the ghetto, they suggest things like eliminating jail sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.
Their effort to be bipartisan sometimes results in the disingenuous use of quotations from sources. For instance, they say they agree with the New York Times's Charles Blow when he says that he "takes enormous exception to arguments about the 'breakdown of the family,' particularly the black family, that don't acknowledge that this country for centuries has endeavored, consciously and not, to break it down."
But on the next page, the authors cite the changes in welfare policy in the 1960s that had the unintended effect of increasing dependence on the government and "penalizing marriage among the poor and working class." For Blow and many on the left, the problem is that government is not giving the poor and working class enough money, not that it has given them too much. Indeed, later in the same column Blow writes, "I don't buy into the mythology that most poor people are ... happy to live with the help of handouts from a benevolent big government that is equally happy to keep them dependent."
Happy might not be the right word--but dependence is dependence.
The real contribution of Soul Mates comes in its analysis of the marital habits of blacks and Latinos and how religious life has and has not affected them. The first set of statistics that stand out are the ones regarding infidelity. Twenty-nine percent of black women report "infidelity or suspected infidelity" in their relationships, compared with 22 percent of Latina women and 7 percent of white women. And those are among the ones who are married. When one looks at partnerships among never-married adults, the patterns become even more stark. Thirty-six percent of black men have had two or more sexual partners in the past year, compared with 23 percent of Latino men and 21 percent of white men.
Forty-two percent of unmarried black women say that "most of the single men I know are not earning enough money." But 55 percent of them say, "men cannot be trusted to be sexually faithful." While there are those who claim that these findings are the result of the legacy of slavery in which black families were forcibly broken up, such theories do not explain why black marriage rates were higher and single motherhood rates were lower in the first half of the 20th century than they are now.
"Whatever their historical roots," note Wilcox and Wolfinger, "concerns about infidelity and distrust come up frequently in our interviews." Keisha, one of the women they spoke with, explained: "I was in a relationship for a long time.... It ended because I was cheated on; so I don't think I don't [sic] really value relationships anymore either."
The authors speculate that there may be other cultural causes of this instability: "Since the 1960s, American popular culture has taken an increasingly hedonistic turn, such that consumers ... are exposed to an ethic of immediate gratification ... that encompasses a range of behaviors from drug use to sexual infidelity." Since blacks and Latino children consume almost twice as much television as whites, this may be having some effect on their behavior.
But the bottom line is this: Even if all the Great Society policies that conservatives see as contributing to these problems were to end tomorrow, the legacy of these decades of family breakdown and mistrust would be hard to erase any time soon.
The only institution that is working against these trends is the church. Unfortunately, for blacks, the church seems to have a weaker effect than it has on whites and Latinos when it comes to all sorts of problems afflicting the communities. For instance, "Churchgoing whites are about half as likely as their less religious peers to have used drugs in the last month, compared to about one-third less likely for Latinos and approximately 15 percent less likely for African Americans." The same is true for binge drinking.
Similarly, there is a strong association between regular church attendance and the belief that premarital sex is always wrong. Regular attendees are also less likely to believe that a single mother can bring up a child as well as two parents can. But in both cases the effects of churchgoing seem to be stronger for whites than for minorities.
So what about marriage? Regular church attendance increases the odds by about two-thirds that someone will be married. For black women, though, the odds go up only about 50 percent. And for Latina women, there is only a 17 percent increase in marriage rates. Church attendance can actually move couples away from the altar, according to the authors, if one partner (usually the woman) is attending and the other is not. In other words, a woman's standards may rise by being a regular churchgoer and she may be more inclined to reject the available options.
Marital happiness tends to increase with churchgoing for all races. And usually it tends to increase marital stability. But the old adage that couples who pray together stay together does not necessarily hold true across the board. Surprisingly, the researchers find that "regular church attendance substantially decreases divorce rates, but only for whites."
Perhaps, the authors propose, this is a selection problem. Whites who attend church are already less likely to believe that divorce is acceptable; indeed, that may be why they want to go to church. But for blacks, attending church is "the expected thing to do." For whites, on the other hand, churchgoing has become "less conventional."
For many blacks, church is more of a social or even a political institution than it is a place to hear messages about personal sin. Wilcox and Wolfinger sample the messages at churches in a number of black and Latino neighborhoods and find that they are fairly watered down. As one black woman reports about her Baptist church in Harlem, her pastor "doesn't talk about [sexual conduct] often." The one time he did, the many single mothers and unmarried couples were very uncomfortable.
The authors write: "We suspect that the abundance of nontraditional families in black and Latino congregations has often left their clergy and lay leaders disinclined to address questions of sex and out-of-wedlock childbearing. This may help explain why religion is less likely to guide the sexual and reproductive behavior of blacks and Latinos."
All of which is to say that the situation is even worse today than it was when Moynihan wrote his report. It's not simply that not enough black men are attending church--a decline he had already begun to see. It's that the people going to church are not getting the messages they used to get. The tangle of pathology is indeed tightening.
NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY is the author of 'Til Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage Is Transforming America.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Riley, Naomi Schaefer. "Don't take me to church." Commentary, Feb. 2016, p. 49+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA443059516&it=r&asid=f0c2ea802ad06302c454b1b6e4f174a0. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A443059516
Marriage and the church: a new study focuses on African Americans and Latinos
Anna Sutherland
22.1 (January-February 2016): p11.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Christianity Today, Inc.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/
Soul Mates
Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos
W. BRADFORD WILCOX AND NICHOLAS WOLFINGER * OXFORD UNIV. PRESS, 2016 * 248 PP. * $27.95
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
"I used a lot of drugs, I drank a lot, I didn't care for my family.... When the weekend came I left my wife and I would go play soccer with friends ... and then go drinking and that was my whole weekend." That's how Roberto Flores, a 37-year-old Mexican American living in San Diego, describes his former life. When his wife, Marcia, convinced him to attend a couples' retreat at a nearby Catholic church, everything changed.
"That's when I met God," Roberto explains. "I cried before God, which was something I never did. I never cry. But a lot of things I never did before I did on that day." After that retreat, Roberto left behind his destructive habits and re-engaged with his wife and kids. He also started going to church, where he has been taught that God "has a plan for marriage," and that "you need a lot of love to raise a good family." Roberto and Marcia's story, one of many recounted in Soul Mates, vividly illustrates how churches can transform marriages and support families--not just among middle-class white evangelicals, but also among racial minorities facing complicated problems like addiction and economic instability. And these days, resources for struggling families are perhaps more crucial than ever. For a combination of cultural, political, and economic reasons, Americans of all racial/ethnic backgrounds are more likely to delay or forego marriage, more likely to divorce, and more likely to have kids outside of marriage than they were fifty years ago. As previous researchers have documented, Christians who attend church regularly have happier and more stable marriages than non-churchgoers, and they are less likely to have children out of wedlock, for reasons I'll get to below. They have been protected to some degree from the post-1960s revolution in family life that is still unfolding today. Yet African Americans and Latinos, who are more religious on average than other racial/ethnic groups, have been particularly vulnerable to that revolution, and religious practice has less of a positive effect on their relationships than it does for whites.
Sociologists W. Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas Wolfinger teamed up to investigate the questions that these patterns raise. Wilcox is a professor at the University of Virginia, director of the National Marriage Project, and a colleague of mine at the Institute for Family Studies; Wolfinger is a professor at the University of Utah. The modest length of Soul Mates belies the extensive research behind the book: it incorporates the results of six national surveys as well as insights gleaned from interviews with 25 members of the clergy and 60 other adults, visits to black and Latino churches, and focus groups in four cities. The volume is accessible, engaging, and at times even moving, despite occasionally getting bogged down by statistics.
At least a few of those statistics are relevant here for the sake of background. In the 1970s, 57 percent of black prime-age adults (20-54 years old) and 70-some percent of whites and Latinos were married. In the current decade, by contrast, the figures stand at 25 percent for African Americans, 47 percent for Latinos, and 49 percent for whites. Contra the common perception, divorce rates are not at an all-time high, but roughly one in five blacks, one in seven whites, and one in eight Latinos who have ever been married are divorced.
Most couples in every racial group report being happy in their relationships, yet by this measure as well, black couples are disadvantaged. Americans of all backgrounds have become far more likely to have children outside marriage since the 1970s; as of 2011,29 percent of white children, 53 percent of Latino children, and 72 percent of black children were born to unmarried parents.
Wilcox and Wolfinger show convincingly that the roots of these racial and ethnic differences are both economic and cultural. First, both African Americans and Latinos are more likely than whites to live in poverty and suffer unemployment, and these factors strain relationships among Americans of all races. It's easy to object to this claim: plenty of couples endured the Great Depression with their marriages intact, after all. But financial stressors are more destructive today, several scholars have argued, because the dominant understanding of marriage has changed. In Wilcox and Wolfinger's words, marriage is now considered "a relationship capstone of sorts that signifies that a couple is 'set,' both financially and emotionally, at a certain level of middle-class comfort and security." Poor and working-class Americans generally still desire marriage, but for many, it's a dream as remote as financial security.
Socioeconomic disparities do not wholly explain divergent patterns in marriage and childbearing, however. Other factors behind black and Latino Americans' fracturing families include the ongoing legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, the stress of experiencing contemporary racism and discrimination, greater exposure to TV and media, and the pull of "street culture." It is worth underlining that the last item--"a lifestyle marked by violent self-assertion, criminal activity, off-the-books work ... and infidelity"--is relevant only to a minority of African Americans and Latinos. But because it affects more black and Latino people than whites, it contributes to racial/ethnic gaps in family formation and stability. (Substance abuse is also tied to street culture, yet it does not seem to be more of a problem for racial minorities than for whites.)
Churches that serve black and Latino communities offer relief from and push back against these relationship-damaging forces. In opposition to the "code of the street," churches preach a "code of decency" entailing "hard work, temperance, responsibility, sexual fidelity, and the Golden Rule," and provide activities and social networks that make it easier to adhere to that ethic. Many churches also address congregants' financial and career struggles by, for instance, pointing them to job opportunities or offering financial management classes. Further, "black and Latino churches often provide a message of hope, acceptance, and comfort as well as opportunities for enthusiastic worship that can be therapeutic for attendees." (This being a work of sociology rather than theology, Soul Mates does not mention the role of divine grace or other supernatural interventions in believers' lives.)
Presumably for reasons such as these, churchgoing African Americans and Latinos are more likely to be employed, happy, and faithful to their partners, and less likely to commit crimes and abuse drugs and alcohol, than their non-churchgoing peers. Similarly, when couples attend church with their friends (who may support their relationship and serve as role models), they report happier relationships. Praying together likewise boosts relationship quality.
What about family values? Do Americans of different racial backgrounds have different views of right and wrong when it comes to relationships and families, and do churches influence their behaviors? The answer is complicated. According to opinion polls, whites are more liberal than their black and Latino counterparts about premarital sex. Yet "pro-child attitudes and accommodating social norms" toward nonmarital childbearing among these two groups "trump attitudes about sex."
Attending church does make a difference in people's moral convictions and behavior: it is linked to reduced odds of nonmarital sex and childbearing, and a greater likelihood of marrying, among whites and minorities alike. Perhaps surprisingly, that doesn't appear to be attributable to hearing sermons on these subjects. Wilcox and Wolfinger report that religious leaders serving black and Latino congregants "only occasionally mention sex, childbearing, or marriage" in services, perhaps for fear of alienating people. If such churches encourage people to marry, it is usually indirectly--through emphasis on the Golden Rule, forgiveness, and other Christian principles that foster happy relationships--rather than directly. (In my experience, the same could be said of plenty of Catholic parishes serving mostly white, upper-middle-class congregations.) In short, churches may be able to do more to address family breakdown than they currently are, but as Roberto and Marcia's experience and other real-life accounts attest, they already play a vital role in regenerating and sustaining Americans' marriages.
The one issue I wish Wilcox and Wolfinger had examined in greater depth is that of sex ratios, particularly among African Americans. I explained the basic dynamics in my review of Marriage Markets last summer: When a community contains more women than men, the desires of single men tend to win out. That means more hookups and less marriage; more infidelity and less trust. (1)
The theory that a shortage of marriageable men explains much of the decline in marriage rates among all races may be overblown, but among African Americans the thesis is more plausible. Due to black men's higher risk of incarceration and early death and their poor employment prospects, there are just 77 employed, never-married 25- to 34-year-old black men for every 100 employed, single black women in that age range, according to scholars at the Brookings Institution. Stanford Law professor Ralph Richard Banks argues in his 2011 book Is Marriage for White People? that this shortage of black men, particularly in the middle class, goes a long way toward explaining why marriage rates have fallen so far in that community.
In fact, Banks believes that the lopsided sex ratio among middle-class African Americans gave rise not just to African Americans' low marriage rates but also to the somewhat mysterious black-white gap in divorce and marital quality. Because middle-class black women are reluctant to pair up with non-black men, and because they face a shortage of black men with education and careers to rival their own, they are willing to marry (black) men with less education and less income than they have. Or as Banks states it more succinctly, "Black women marry down because they don't marry out." An income gap favoring the woman frustrates both husband and wife (a tendency Wilcox and Wolfinger also note), and a gap in education levels often spells differences in values and priorities. The resulting tensions may contribute to elevated levels of divorce, and lower levels of marital happiness, among African Americans, Banks proposes.
But perhaps it's unfair to criticize a book that breaks new ground for failing to describe every inch of well-tilled soil. In explaining how religion influences (and fails to influence) black and Latino couples, Soul Mates can equip church leaders to better serve couples of all races.
(1.) "Inequality and the American Family," Books & Culture, May/June 2015, pp. 19,21.
Anna Sutherland is editor of Family-Studies.org.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sutherland, Anna. "Marriage and the church: a new study focuses on African Americans and Latinos." Books & Culture, Jan.-Feb. 2016, p. 11+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA444596366&it=r&asid=6b548c093176a491a11c98131dc05f62. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A444596366
Wilcox, W. Bradford. Soul mates: religion, sex, love, and marriage among African Americans and Latinos
B. Weston
53.10 (June 2016): p1549.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Wilcox, W. Bradford. Soul mates: religion, sex, love, and marriage among African Americans and Latinos, by W. Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas Wolfinger. Oxford, 2016. 225p bibl index afp ISBN 9780195394221 cloth, $27.95; ISBN 9780199908318 ebook, contact publisher for price
53-4610
BV835
MARC
Sociologists Wilcox (Virginia) and Wolfinger (Utah), already leading researchers on marriage and family life, have written a solid, well-researched book on how religious involvement helps, modestly, to strengthen marriage among African Americans and Latinos. The authors consistently examine both structural and cultural causes for the differences in marriage rates, duration, and happiness among white, black, and Latino Americans. They integrate findings from large national data sets, focus group interviews, and long-term resident observation in black and Latino communities and churches. Wilcox and Wolfinger admit that they still have not penetrated the mystery of why black relationships are not as happy or long lasting as those of whites or Latinos, but they have tested most of the explanations that social science has offered. This short, readable book will be the standard academic reference on this subject for some time to come. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.--B. Weston, Centre College
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Weston, B. "Wilcox, W. Bradford. Soul mates: religion, sex, love, and marriage among African Americans and Latinos." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1549. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454943021&it=r&asid=26409af99c3b750eb1c07ded32f57943. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454943021
Whither the child?: causes and consequences of low fertility
A.H. Koblitz
50.12 (Aug. 2013): p2275.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
50-6834
HB901
2012-1775 CIP
Whither the child?: causes and consequences of low fertility, ed. by Eric Kaufmann and W. Bradford Wilcox. Paradigm Publishers, 2013. 253pbibl index afp ISBN 9781612050935, $99.00; ISBN 9781612050942 pbk, $34.95
At the heart of this collection are the authors' concerns about the so-called second demographic transition (SDT), in which the fertility levels of certain countries (notably Japan, Italy, Spain, and most of the countries of the former socialist bloc) have fallen far below replacement levels, and the populations are rapidly aging. The SDT has created panic in many quarters, especially since policy makers are generally reluctant to consider the most obvious method of dealing with the problem: the encouragement of immigrants who are desperate to leave their homelands because of war, famine, natural disaster, or neoliberal economic restructuring. While the essays occasionally raise provocative questions (for example, whether the SDT is really a cause for concern at all), it is unclear to what extent any of the conclusions of the articles can be considered reliable. The time of data collection varies widely, and many of the underlying assumptions seem dubious in the extreme. Much of the research is based on surveys whose methods and relevance are questionable. In the past, demographers have not proven particularly adept at predicting changes in fertility patterns or even explaining those changes when they have occurred. This collection does not appear likely to improve demographers' track record in this regard. Summing Up: Optional. * Specialists/faculty.--A. H. Koblitz, Arizona State University
Koblitz, A.H.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Koblitz, A.H. "Whither the child?: causes and consequences of low fertility." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Aug. 2013, p. 2275. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA338216787&it=r&asid=18b464dde4bf43b592df88b97f23ea99. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A338216787
Gender and parenthood: biological and social scientific perspectives
B. Weston
50.12 (Aug. 2013): p2273.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
50-6824
HQ755
2012-39624 CIP
Gender and parenthood: biological and social scientific perspectives, ed. by W. Bradford Wilcox and Kathy Kovner Kline. Columbia, 2013. 363p bibl index afp ISBN 9780231160681, $105.00; ISBN 9780231160698 pbk, $35.00
Sociologist Wilcox and psychiatrist Kline have edited the results of a very professional conference of medical and social scientists about how sex and gender shape parenting differently. The articles are mostly current overviews of research on specific subfields, such as how mothers' and fathers' brains are differently affected by parenthood, and how mothers' and fathers' different ways of nurturing infants affects the children. Particularly useful is "Gendered Parenting's Implications for Children's Well-Being" by Rob Palkovitz. There are a few new studies as well--notably, the chapter by editor Wilcox and Jeffrey Dew on how the distribution of the work-family balance among married parents reflects the different underlying preferences in what mothers want. A solid handbook of current research generally showing real sex differences in parenting. Summing Up: Highly recommended. **** Upper-division undergraduates and above.--B. Weston, Centre College
Weston, B.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Weston, B. "Gender and parenthood: biological and social scientific perspectives." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Aug. 2013, p. 2273. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA338216777&it=r&asid=5bcb55fa5aed89a40a11592a69c0f99b. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A338216777
Whither the child?; causes and consequences of low fertility
28.1 (Feb. 2013):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
9781612050942
Whither the child?; causes and consequences of low fertility.
Ed. by Eric Kaufmann and W. Bradford Wilcox.
Paradigm Publishers
2013
253 pages
$34.95
HB901
A 2010 meeting sponsored by the Social Trends Institute in Barcelona, Spain, brought together leading practitioners and scholars in demography, social science, economics, and policy studies to ask how changing gender roles, religious values, belief systems, and family norms are affecting fertility. Unlike other books on the subject, this one engages with issues of child psychology, parenting, family, and social policy, raising questions about the social and emotional consequences of being an 'only child,' the relationship between secularism and fertility decline, the effect of parenthood on adults' engagement with society, and an often-overlooked question: Do children make parents happy? A companion web site contains additional data tables and figures. The book's readership includes general readers, students, scholars, and policy makers. Kaufmann is affiliated with Birkbeck College, University of London. Wilcox directs the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.
([c] Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Whither the child?; causes and consequences of low fertility." Reference & Research Book News, Feb. 2013. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA317043484&it=r&asid=3c34b4845f8d4344740219ec063f73f1. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A317043484
Soft Patriarchs and New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands
Darren E. Sherkat
84.1 (Sept. 2005): p614.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Oxford University Press
Soft Patriarchs and New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands By W. Bradford Wilcox University of Chicago Press, 2004. 328 pages. $20 (paper)
Soft Patriarchs is the latest in a series of works by conservative Christian devotees reinterpreting social institutions from the lens of their distinctive faith. Here, Bradford Wilcox argues that liberal Protestant groups embraced an egalitarian family ideal, influenced by feminism and humanistic psychology. In contrast, conservative Protestant groups held on to gender and family traditionalism. As a consequence of egalitarian orientations, Wilcox argues that family became less salient for liberal Protestants and that it has failed to serve as a civilizing institution for men.
Wilcox's review of the literature on empirical connections between religion and family is limited, and sweeping generalizations are often supported with references to activist commentary rather than scientific inquiry. Wilcox's main thesis offers top down mechanisms; nefarious liberal Protestant elites infected with feminism and social justice construct anti-family messages promoting divorce, abortion, homosexuality and childlessness. In contrast, sectarians cling to the gods-given vision of a male-headed household, female subordination, and child-centered. Catholics are ignored, which is odd given their strong family orientations and large share of the American religious market.
Wilcox's thesis gives primacy to the causal power of beliefs, yet he does not provide a systematic rendering of conservative or liberal Christian belief structures regarding family. Sectarians believe that human nature is generally evil and must be monitored by authorities to assure salvation. Liberals believe that humans are basically good, and require positive conditions to assure their deliverance. Wilcox pays lip service to Nancy Ammerman's discussion of "golden rule Christianity," but he does not examine how belief structures rooted in liberal Christianity may lead to different visions of family relations. Wilcox dismisses nonpatriarchal family forms as anti-family, and the potentially negative impact of inegalitarian orientations and behaviors are deemed inconsequential "soft" patriarchy.
Wilcox examines data from three separate national datasets, and analyses focus on differences between active sectarians from active mainline affiliates. The omission of Catholics makes this is a much less useful book for sociologists. Wilcox typically limits his subjects to those married with children. While Wilcox argues for profound differences between liberal Protestants and sectarian Protestants, the differences are often small. Still, Wilcox convincingly demonstrates that active sectarian protestants hold negative views of women with children in the labor force, they believe laws against divorce, and oppose premarital sex.
Wilcox does not critically assess the implication of these findings. Even sectarian Christian women have high rates of labor force participation, thus, male co-religionists think less of them for working. This is likely to cause considerable conflict within families. Opposition to premarital sex is partly responsible for sectarians' early ages of marriage, which Wilcox extols as being pro-family. This is exceedingly odd given that age at marriage is one of the strongest negative predictors of divorce. Not surprisingly, sectarian Protestants have the highest rates of divorce--a problem Wilcox grudgingly admits in the conclusions. Opposition to divorce makes sectarian communities less able to provide coping resources for families who have experienced divorce.
On childrearing, sectarian Christians are found to spank more, yell less, monitor behaviors, and spend more time with their children. Most of the differences are small, but the finding about supervision and time could have used additional elaboration. Sectarian Christians monitor and discipline their children more closely because they believe this is necessary--if humans are inherently corrupt and prone to sin, then children cannot be trusted. Liberal parents trust their children to do what is right. Notably, American prisons are not full of Episcopalians and Presbyterians whose parents failed to monitor their television or shadow their every move. Also, the age structure and high rates of participation in sectarian churches enable them to front more programs for children, while liberal groups do not have as many opportunities for generating parental involvement with children--belief differences are less important.
Wilcox's argues that there is an "enchanted economy of gratitude" in sectarian households. While sectarian men shirk their domestic chores, sectarian women report feeling "appreciated" and they are happy with the love and affection they receive. Of course, "appreciation" is a rooted in the patriarchal system--for egalitarian couples, respect and mutual cooperation are the more applicable qualities valued in family relations. Further, sectarian Christians are bombarded with a rhetoric of family relations that makes social desirability biases very strong, since it is a sin to covet alternative relations. A better measure of the family economy of sectarians would be the rate of divorce. Viewed this way, the patriarchal economy is not as inviting. Women limit their career opportunities, do all of the housework, and have few opportunities outside of the sect. Early marriages, lower incomes, and inegalitarian roles in the family generate conflict, as do higher demands for child rearing created by incessant monitoring and high fertility. These conflicts often lead to divorce, which is a source of ostracism from the community and since the "home" is the woman's sphere, the blame for divorce disproportionately rests on her. Patriarchy does seem like a good deal for men, just not for families.
Reviewer: Darren E. Sherkat, Department of Sociology, University of Illinois
Sherkat, Darren E.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sherkat, Darren E. "Soft Patriarchs and New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands." Social Forces, vol. 84, no. 1, 2005, p. 614+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA137453818&it=r&asid=75df5a9c240bbb3d68e0960502f24ada. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A137453818
The patriarchal bargain
Charlotte Allen
.151 (Mar. 2005): p41.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Institute on Religion and Public Life
http://www.firstthings.com/
SOFT PATRIARCHS, NEW MEN: HOW CHRISTIANITY SHAPES FATHERS AND HUSBANDS By W. BRADFORD WILCOX University of Chicago Press 328 pp. $20 paper.
IN THE IMAGINATIONS of feminists and their admirers in the media and intelligentsia, there lurks a kind of bogeyman--the conservative Christian man--a neanderthalic creature who, if he does not regularly beat his wife black-and-blue in the name of God, at least keeps her in her proper place, the kitchen, preferably shoeless and perpetually gestating.
We see this monster in Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale, where a theocratic patriarchy forbids women to read books, and we see him in the movie Kinsey, in which the future sexologist's pompous, teetotaling, Bible-wielding father (played by the massive-browed John Lithgow) cows his wife at the dinner table and disowns his son for daring to attend a different college from the one where dad teaches. We hear the evangelical Promise Keepers movement denounced by Patricia Ireland of the National Organization for Women as a "feel-good form of male supremacy" designed to "keep women in the back seat." And when the Southern Baptists issued a statement in 1998 affirming the father's headship of the family as defined in the New Testament letters of Paul of Tarsus, we heard journalists Cokie Roberts and Steve Roberts warning the nation that this sort of thing could "lead to abuse, both physical and emotional."
Soft Patriarchs, New Men by W. Bradford Wilcox, a young sociologist of religion at the University of Virginia, is a study of the actual surveyed attitudes and practices of the married men of the so-called "religious right" that turns this stereotype on its head. Wilcox reports that Christian conservative fathers, at least the ones who attend church frequently, are actually far more affectionate with and emotionally invested in their wives and children than are their counterparts among either mainline Protestants or the unchurched. They are patriarchs, says Wilcox, with a "traditional, authority-minded approach to parenting," but they are soft patriarchs (more akin, shall we say, to Ned Flanders in "The Simpsons" than to the Commander in Atwood's novel). Wilcox concludes--and this is richly ironic--that Christian conservative fathers display many of the qualities of the sensitive, thoroughly domesticated "iconic new man" whom the feminists lionize.
Wilcox has not written a religious or political polemic here but rather a scrupulously even-handed report, basing his conclusions on his statistical analysis of three large-scale national surveys of U.S. adults' social attitudes conducted from the late 1980s through the '90s. He frequently cites the work of Frank Furstenburg and Arlie Hochschild, two sociologists of family and gender relations whose views are by no means ideologically conservative, and he avoids value-loaded language, especially when it comes to describing the mainline Protestant churches whose leadership has, by and large, capitulated to the secular-elitist acceptance of extramarital sex, abortion, homosexuality, and other practices that conservative Christians view as inimical to moral life and family health.
A polemicist might well have salty things to say about this abdication of moral principles that Christians have held since the earliest days of the faith, but in Wilcox's mild and irenic diction the mainline churches are simply "accommodationist," espousing what he calls a "Golden Rule Christianity" that honors tolerance, kindness, and social justice as paramount virtues. Wilcox's aim is clearly to engage his sociological confreres as well as the public at large; thus he lays out his case in such a careful and dispassionate manner that many lay readers are likely to find his book, with its many pages of endnotes and its numerous regression tables, colorless and dull, although its conclusions are anything but that.
WILCOX SEEMS to have picked Protestants to study because their large number of denominations makes them relatively easy to classify by ideological and theological subgroup. (Catholics, for example, can also be classified as liberals or conservatives, but there is no convenient yardstick, even that of frequent Mass attendance, for measuring where they stand.) Mainline Protestants (Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and the like) and evangelical/fundamentalist Protestants (an umbrella group of conservative churches including the Pentecostal, Baptist, Anabaptist, and Reformed traditions) not only belong to distinctly different kinds of churches, but they generally hold distinctly different views on such matters as theological orthodoxy and the inerrancy of the Bible, upon which conservative Christians are predictably conservative. Through the 1950s, however, all Christians of whatever stripe held to what Wilcox calls "the ideology of familism" that invested marriage, childbearing, and the household with sacredness, and in which, at least since the Industrial Revolution, men were the chief economic providers while the domestic sphere and the welfare of the children were chiefly the domain of women.
All this changed when the sexual revolution and the rise of feminism ushered in easy divorce, the expectation of a career outside the home for married women, ready access to contraception and abortion, and the gay-rights movement. The mainline Protestants quickly embraced the new "diversity," especially of family living arrangements. The religious conservatives, beset by this sea change in the secular culture, might have been expected to retrench into their conventional media stereotypes: authoritarian, emotionally uninvolved husbands and fathers, a rigidly patriarchal family style, deeply gendered domestic roles that kept women at home--plus, as Wilcox puts it, "high levels of corporal punishment and domestic violence." Alternatively, many sociologists predicted that, with the increasing emphasis on individualism and the therapeutic in American culture, religion would have an increasingly marginal influence on domestic life, and the traditional family as the 1950s knew it would gradually disappear in the face of "family modernization," as some theorists called it.
Instead, as Wilcox notes, something very different and unanticipated happened. Conservative Protestantism indeed made an aggressive countercultural push, starting in the 1970s, to shore up the traditional family. Efforts ranged from family ministries in individual churches to "parachurch" pastoral groups such as James Dobson's Focus on the Family to national political organizations such as Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority. But it also subtly accommodated itself to such elements of late modernity as the therapeutic culture, increasing numbers of wives working outside the home, and a new expectation that husbands as well as wives should involve themselves emotionally in home life and the well-being of the children.
The idea was, as Wilcox writes, "that conservative Protestantism domesticates men by linking male authority to a demanding ethic of male familial involvement. It offers men a 'patriarchal bargain' that accords men symbolic authority in the home in return for the exercise of greater responsibility for the well-being of their families." One example of conservative Protestantism's new focus on expressive interpersonal relations, Wilcox notes, is that Fuller Theological Seminary, a leading training ground for evangelical ministers, established a psychology department in 1965.
Hence, the soft patriarch, the "servant leader" who simultaneously negotiates traditional gender roles and an egalitarian ethos with respect to his spouse. The wife submits to her husband, as in the first part of Paul's dictum in Ephesians 5, and the husband fulfills the second part of Paul's injunction by laying down his life for his wife as Christ did for his Church (which might have been what Paul had in mind in the first place). Wilcox's extrapolations from the statistics suggest that the new model of emotionally involved fatherhood is paying off.
Active (that is, regularly churchgoing), married conservative Protestant fathers have more one-on-one interaction with their children than do mainline Protestants, conservative Protestants who seldom attend church, or the religiously unaffiliated. They are also more likely to be involved in youth-related activities. At the same time, conservative pastors and parachurch organizations alike urge fathers not to relinquish their parental authority and to set rules (such as supervising children's television-viewing and monitoring their whereabouts) to counter the morally negative aspects of the secular culture. Churchgoing conservative fathers discipline their children via corporal punishment more frequently than other groups of fathers, but they do so in the context of a religious ideology that urges them never to spank a child in anger. They are less likely to yell at their children than mainline Protestant fathers, and they praise and hug their children more than the other men studied.
On the subject of spousal relations, churchgoing conservative Protestant husbands surpass every other kind of Protestant husband, from mainline to nominal, in making their wives happy in every way, not only showing more love and affection but also socializing more with their wives and understanding them better. (Wilcox does not mention the recent and widely publicized finding that evangelical wives have better sex lives with their husbands than religiously unaffiliated do with theirs, but it seems to follow that this would be so.) This, despite the fact that conservative Protestant households are more gender-traditional in terms of duties than others, with husbands performing less housework than husbands in other categories. Yet, as Wilcox points out, this doesn't seem to matter to their wives, because as sociologists before him have noted, marriages seem to function in an "economy of gratitude" in which the husband's expression of appreciation for his wife's work counts more than totting up who took out the garbage when. Schooled by organizations such as Focus on the Family, conservative Protestant men evidently appreciate their wives highly and find ways to communicate that appreciation.
Wilcox notes that soft patriarchs aren't just a phenomenon of conservative Protestantism, but are to be found these days in "traditional Catholic parishes, Mormon temples, and Orthodox synagogues." They can also be found (although not in the same abundance) in mainline Protestant churches, because those churches continue to foster family-friendly activities and because many individual mainliners are more theologically and socially conservative than their leadership. Wilcox's welcome study makes a strong case that accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior--or making an equivalent commitment to an ancient and demanding faith--is the best predictor of marital and familial happiness to be found.
Reviewed by Charlotte Allen
CHARLOTTE ALLEN is the author of The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus (1998).
Allen, Charlotte
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Allen, Charlotte. "The patriarchal bargain." First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, no. 151, 2005, p. 41+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA129368249&it=r&asid=a31876db0351a7c21c3d288b5cf9f77f. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A129368249
Good Christian men: how faith shapes fathers
Don Browning
122.1 (Jan. 11, 2005): p18.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 The Christian Century Foundation
http://www.christiancentury.org
Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands.
By W. Bradford Wilcox. University of Chicago Press, 337 pp., $62.00; paperback, $20.00.
BY EXPLORING the contradictions between official theologies and the actual behavior of religions communities, sociologists of religion help religious people to view themselves more honestly--a sometimes deflating and even painful process. Such may be our experience in reading W. Bradford Wilcox's Soft Patriarchs, New Men, perhaps one of the most important studies of American religion to come along in recent decades.
Wilcox explores how American Protestantism shapes the behavior of husbands and fathers. He asks, "Does religion in general and Protestantism in particular oppose or support the emergence of the new father--the father committed to egalitarianism in the home on issues of paid employment for both wife and husband, child care and domestic chores?" He defines the "new man" as the father and husband who supports his wife's work outside of the home, spends time with the children, washes the dishes, attends Johnny's soccer games, helps with the school work and brings home his share of the cash.
Who does a better job of being this new husband and father--unaffiliated secular men, evangelicals who listen to the Promise Keepers or Focus on the Family, or liberal mainliners who attend older and well-established churches? Ask college students from elite schools that question, and they will probably say that most of the new fathers belong to the secular and unaffiliated group. Ask mainliners and they will say that liberal Protestant men are certainly better husbands and fathers than are the conservatives who follow the blatant patriarchy of a James Dobson or Jerry, Falwell. Ask conservative Protestants and they may tell you that they are not sure that being a new father is a good thing. According to Wilcox, none of these answers is accurate.
A rising star in the sociology of religion, Wilcox thinks there is much to admire in the new fatherhood. But it is a complex phenomenon. And the sociological evidence shows that evangelical men are not the obstacles to the new manhood that many feminists, liberals and academics have thought.
Wilcox sets the entire discussion about religion and family within the context of the impact of modernization. Participants in the present conflict over families within American churches and denominations would do well to take the modernization factor more seriously than they have in recent debates.
Wilcox uses a widely accepted explanatory principle in sociology called the "family modernization perspective." This is a theoretical view of modern societies that attempts to explain why families become weaker and less important in advanced industrial societies. The increased differentiation of institutions and their autonomy from religion, the expansion of the power of the state, the higher rates of participation by both men and women in the wage economy, the increased delegation of family functions like education, leisure and food preparation to the market and the state--all these trends weaken family functions. These developments "diminish the strength and authority of the family as an institution, thereby reducing the incentives and dependencies that once fostered high levels of commitment to and investment in the family."
THE DIFFERENCES between conservative and mainline Protestants in family ideology and practices can be seen in how the two groups cope with the modernization process. This process is attuned to the needs of a technological society, in which gender differences increasingly are less important, functional equality for technical roles is more useful, cooperation and tolerance make the workplace more efficient, and sexual behavior and family life are less relevant to work life. Conservatives tend to resist the family modernization process; mainliners tend to accommodate it.
From 1970 to the present, mainline churches have officially been more tolerant than conservative churches of divorce, abortion, gender equality, family pluralism and homosexuality--all changes in keeping with the family modernization process. Conservatives--in spite of the fact that they are now better educated and wealthier than in the past, and have witnessed a significant increase in the number of religiously conservative women working outside the home--still resist most of these changes on the ideological level.
So who are the heroes and heroines of this drama--the liberals supporting family modernization or the conservative resisting it? Is the mainline really serving justice and equality, or is it serving the functional demands and leveling universalism of a technologically driven market economy? Are conservative Protestants a bunch of patriarchal Neanderthal men and kitchen-bound, barefoot and pregnant women, or are they people courageously building a wall against the depersonalizing and family-destructive trends of modern societies addicted to efficiency and profit? One's answer to these questions is influenced by one's theological and philosophical critique of modernity.
Wilcox argues that this question is more difficult to answer than Protestant liberals might like to think. Here is his punch line: Protestant conservatives may be far more innovative in coping with modernity than most theological and religious liberals have believed. Furthermore, liberal Protestants may be more culturally conformist and have more difficulty living up to equality in family relations than they realize. Wilcox trots out a bucket of data to support these conclusions. He analyzes the statistics of three massive national surveys--the National Survey of Families and Households, the Survey of Adults and Youth, and the General Social Survey.
Wilcox also is extremely perceptive about the role of theology, ideology and history in the shaping of religious identity and behavior. He tells the cultural story of how mainline and conservative Protestants came to respond so differently to the family modernization process. He reviews the amount of attention given to family, sexuality and justice in the liberal CHRISTIAN CENTURY and the conservative Christianity Today. Until recently, the CENTURY has paid a lot more attention to justice and sexuality than to marriage and family, while Christianity Today has spilled much more ink on family, marriage and sexuality than on issues dealing with social justice. The two journals both reflect and shape the views of their readers.
Here is a fast review of some of Wilcox's findings, all worth thinking about: Conservative Protestant men are more likely to believe in the principle of "male headship" than mainline and unaffiliated men, and they do less housework than men in either of these two groups. They also are inclined to spank their children a bit more, though liberal Protestant men do their fair share of that as well, especially if they are regular church attenders. But there are sonic surprises. On most other measures evangelical men do better. Conservative Protestant men are more engaged with their children, more affectionate and expressive toward them, more likely to praise and hug both their children and their wives, more likely to know their children's whereabouts, and more likely to supervise their television time. The more active they are in church, the more likely they are to show these behaviors.
IN SHORT, mainline men may be a tad fairer about sharing housework, though they still do not share the load equally with their wives. But they are less affectionate with both wives and children and less inclined to praise and show gratitude to their wives for the contributions they make at home and in their paid employment. Evangelical women feel more appreciated and report more happiness with their marriages than mainline women do.
How does Wilcox explain this? He thinks fairness in work-sharing and decision-making is important; it is something women want. But it is not the only thing they want. Women also value affection and appreciation. University of Washington psychologist John Gottman provides insight into this issue. The central factor in good marital communication, according to Gottman's research, is the amount of positive over negative affect that is expressed between couples. Gratitude means a lot, and it seems that evangelical women think they get more of it.
There is a big difference between men who are nominal Protestants, whether conservative or liberal, and those who actively and regularly attend church. Active liberal and active conservative Protestant men look very much alike. In short, liberal men who are active in their churches look more traditional than nominal Protestant men and are more traditional than the official gender and family ideologies of their denominations. There is a looser fit between the liberal ideology of the mainline Protestant churches and what their men actually think and do than there is between conservative Protestant family ideology and the behavior of conservative men.
But both active conservative and active liberal Protestant men exhibit more behaviors consistent with the idea of the new man than do unaffiliated men. Unaffiliated men are more likely to lack a positive devotion to the family, whether they are conservative or liberal. But this generalization is true only when paternal engagement, emotional expressiveness, warmth and praise are figured into the equation. Conservative Protestant men have a way to go in demonstrating fairness with their wives, who increasingly choose to be in the paid work torte. But liberal Protestant men have a way to go in expressing warmth, being engaged with their children and showing graft-hide to their wives.
Wilcox speculates about the future of fatherhood. He is not deterministic in his attitude toward the inevitability of the modernization process and what it means for the decline of the family, the increased marginalization of fathers and the growth in the number of divorces, single parents, out-of-wedlock births and nonmarried couples. The future will bring a variety of responses to modernity, he predicts. But the particular response of conservative Protestantism may contain more creativity, justice and health than the wider public has been led to think. Many conservative Protestant men are both soft patriarchs and, in their own way, new fathers. And many liberal men have some distance yet to travel before truly becoming new fathers.
This book deserves serious study by both conservative and liberal Protestants. Many of the tensions on family issues between these two groups could be ameliorated if leaders and laypeople read and understood this excellent book.
Don Browning is professor of religious ethics and the social sciences at the University of Chicago Divinity School and former director of the Religion, Culture and Family Project.
Browning, Don
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Browning, Don. "Good Christian men: how faith shapes fathers." The Christian Century, vol. 122, no. 1, 2005, p. 18+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA127277426&it=r&asid=1e085f8986dc9ec92a71befbb633a57e. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A127277426
Soul Mates
Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos
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W. Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas H. Wolfinger
New York, NY:
Oxford University Press
, February
2016.
248 pages.
$27.95.
Hardcover.
ISBN 9780195394221.
For other formats: Link to Publisher's Website.
Review
Religion is, arguably, second only to family as the most influential institution shaping American life, providing practices, values, and social spaces that connect groups of people with one another. The shifting landscape of American family life during the last couple of decades, then, evokes questions about the relationship between family and religion. In Soul Mates, W. Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas H. Wolfinger take up the question of religion’s impact on the family, and investigate the possibility that religion creates conditions for successful relationships in both African American and Latino communities. The authors conclude that religion “is linked to higher marriage rates and happier relationships in large part because churches foster an ethic of care and enforce a code of decency among their members” (24).
According to Wilcox and Wolfinger’s research, consistent church attendance breeds a set of orientations and behaviors that support stability and happiness within marriages, families, and relationships. They use this information in chapter 3 to claim that faith makes a difference in how African Americans and Latinos relate to sexual activity and childbearing. Wilcox and Wolfinger find, though this is not as significant as with whites, religious influence on sexual and childbearing behavior is notable for African Americans and Latinos. Even more, they argue that these groups generally maintain traditional views about sex and child bearing and have a low likelihood of both pre-marital and extra-marital sex, and bearing children outside of marriage.
The authors also examine pro-marriage attitudes in African American and Latino communities. They suggest that religion does indeed promote marriage as an ideal relational goal and leads to measurably higher marriage rates among these groups. According to Wilcox and Wolfinger in chapter 4, these higher rates are a consequence of the significant and positive emphasis churches place on family life. Connected with the code of decency, such an emphasis results in collective appreciation for stable, long-standing relationships. They also claim—in chapter 5 and in the conclusion—that religion influences the quality of relationships within these groups. Beyond stability, Wilcox and Wolfinger assert that both married and unmarried couples who engage in religious faith practices enjoy happy, high-quality relationships.
Soul Mates is an interesting exposition of the valuable role religion plays in the lives and relationships of African Americans and Latinos. Wilcox and Wolfinger aptly use survey data and interviews to explore the dearth of information about these communities since much of the information circulating about the social, cultural, and economic realities among African Americans and Latinos excludes religion as an influential vector. Yet their examination of religion in these communities derives mainly from Christian perspectives, and “church” becomes synonymous with “religious institution” in a way that obfuscates other religious practices and beliefs within these communities. Given their attention to the practical and moral value of affinity groups, they would have done well to attend to the diverse ways in which these groups form, and learn from a variety of religiously oriented gatherings and spaces. Even more, their discussion of religion’s impact builds on a notion of decency, yet Wilcox and Wolfinger never explain what such decency entails.
Another concern is Wilcox and Wolfinger’s slippery usage of language related to race and ethnicity. Throughout the book, “black” becomes synonymous with “African American.” For example, they write, “Nevertheless, judging by the preaching, teaching, and pastoral programming of black and Latino churches, we expect religion to foster adherence to the code of decency among African Americans and Latinos in the United States” (55). Such slippage erases the conceptual and concrete complexity of race and ethnicity in a text focused on the experience of racially minoritized groups, designating African American-ness as the lens through which readers ought to understand blackness. What do the authors make, for example, of Afro-Latinos? Intersectional analysis would have been a helpful tool for Wilcox and Wolfinger to apply to the social identity categories investigated in this book.
Ultimately, I find Wilcox and Wolfinger’s exploration in Soul Mates an intriguing—albeit heterosexually focused—contribution to discourse on American families. Smartly researched and coherently written, their text offers insight into the shifting landscape of relationships within communities that experience significant external pressures and face systematic oppression. This concentrated study on minoritized relational practices results in an informed description of the religious resources positively impacting African American and Latino communities.
About the Reviewer(s):
Nikki (Thelathia) Young is Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Bucknell University.
Date of Review:
August 30, 2016
About the Author(s)/Editor(s)/Translator(s):
W. Bradford Wilcox is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. He also serves as a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Nicholas H. Wolfinger is Professor in the Department of Family and Consumer Studies and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of Utah.