Here as promised, just a couple of things which make one wonder.
First, let's compare two African countries, Mali and Kenya: Mali consists of 95% Muslims and has 1% children living in single parents households, vs respectively 84.8% of Christians in Kenya and the amount of single parent households comparable to that of the Western countries (16%).
Next, you have 12% of single parent households in Germany, a country with lots of Catholics (and even less in a predominantly Catholic Poland) vs 21% in Protestant UK and 23% in Protestant USA.
Does it mean that Islam is superior to Christianity and Catholicism to Protestantism? Obviously, as a Protestant Christian myself, I don't think so and here is the proof: according to the data from the blog called Secular Patriarchy in 1867 the divorce rate in the USA was 2.8%, the total of all women working around the same time was 13.1% while the illegitimacy rate even as recent as a hundred years ago was only 2%.
So, what changed? Jesse Powell and one of my commenters both tie it up with married women working outside home, and while it's definitely a factor, I think there is more to this. I don't know whether in Kenya more women currently work than in Mali (which could very well be true), but every Muslim country has laws that will be based on their religion, which even though it allows divorce, strongly discourages it. Catholic countries typically have stricter divorce laws, too. I know that in Germany you have to live separately for at least one year to be granted a divorce.
Now, to quote Jesse again: Due to the introduction of no-fault divorce where either the husband or
wife can initiate a divorce simply as a matter of choice without having
to prove “fault” of the other party the divorce rate went from 25.8% in
1960 to 48.1% in 1975.
There are many people out there who will tell you that laws don't really matter, but it's hardly true. Scriptures actually teach us that the law exists for the lawless and disobedient, which every society has its share of, and the absence of the legal framework to contain them will only embolden them further and drag others into the ruin.
Looking at the history of the family breakdown in the West one can't help but wonder whether it was all by design.
Here in Finland one of the problems is that people do not get married in the first place. I know couples who have been together for 20 years and have several kids and are not married. Those, of coure, are not count as singe-parent families.
ReplyDeleteBut if people are not even married, it is so much easier to just leave when life with kids gets too tiresome.
And, of course, women get pregnant to one-night-stands or other short affairs and never hear about the father again. Sometimes they even do it intentionally, they just want a baby, not the man.
So I would suggest sexual morals also play a big part. It does not help if divorce is difficult to get, if people don't bother marrying at all, and if it's seen fit to just shag around and have babies with men you barely know.
Social pressure used to exist for the same reason laws do: it is to protect stupid and immoral people from themselves.
Yes, sexual revolution was another factor, but again, illegitimacy used not only to carry a stigma, there were laws which, for instance, forbade illegitimate children to inherit,which played their role, too.
ReplyDeleteHere is a wiki article on cohabitation which mentions that the USA used to have laws against it, even as far as the 20th century:
"Before the mid-20th century, laws against cohabitation, fornication, adultery and other such behaviors were common in the US (especially in Southern and Northeastern states), but these laws have been gradually abolished or struck down by courts as unconstitutional.[123][124][125]
Cohabitation was almost impossible in the United States prior to the 1960s. Laws prevented unmarried couples from registering in hotels and it was very difficult for an unmarried couple to obtain a home mortgage. From 1960 to 1998, cohabitation moved from disreputable and difficult to normal and convenient."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohabitation
So it didn't "just happen", it was the consequence of changing the law.
Here in Finland unmarried people over 24 years old had to pay more taxes. The law was changed as late as 1975. It was called "Spinster's tax".
ReplyDeleteInteresting. Yes, that's when all these laws started disappearing, late 1960-1970s.
ReplyDelete