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Showing posts with the label Institute for American Values

Shape or be shaped: Christians in an era of marriage decline

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February 6, 2013 ( Mercatornet.com ) - Christians throughout the West are dismayed at plummeting church attendance figures. They blame video games, or left-wing teachers, or Richard Dawkins . But perhaps the real answer is closer to home -- their own families. Divorce, single motherhood and cohabitation have been  destabilising  family life in America and other developed countries for decades. About one million children in the US each year experience the divorce of their parents, and more than half the children born to women under 30 are now born outside marriage. Reproductive technologies are also adding ambiguity -- and potential fault lines -- to family relationships. Christians as a whole  seem as likely  as the average American to be caught up in these trends. At the same time religious practice and church affiliation are declining. It seems obvious that these twin crises of marriage and faith are related, but what are the dynamics? Did religion de...

Gay Marriage will slowly destroy heterosexual marriage

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July 4, 2012 ( thePublicDiscourse.com ) - “We’ve been fighting about gay marriage for what, 15-20 years now. Is there any evidence that fighting gay marriage is contributing to a greater appreciation among the broad society of the marital institution? Is there any evidence that the re-institutionalization of marriage is happening as a result of opposing gay marriage? And the best answer I can give to that is ‘no.’” – David Blankenhorn . With that quote Mark Oppenheimer, the Beliefs columnist of the New York Times , begins his transcript of a new documentary, “ David Blankenhorn and the Battle Over Same-Sex Marriage ,” which was released on last month along with an op-ed by Blankenhorn in the New York Times entitled “ How My View on Gay Marriage Changed .” Maybe you’ve never heard of David Blankenhorn. But he’s a very significant figure in the larger struggle over our fraying marriage culture. In the early 1990s, Blankenhorn wrote a book called Fatherless America and launched...