Still Coming Apart
It appears that in the 1970’s and early 80’s, marriage before children remained pretty much the expected norm among working-class couples, at least when men were well employed; by the 2000’s, that norm no longer held. Marriage has become irrelevant to lower middle-class women’s decisions about childbearing. The most disturbing part of this is that even in the lower middle class, children growing up with married parents are more likely to go to college and earn a high income at age 25—that is, to be upwardly mobile. For that to happen—and to see inequality and immobility decline across all classes—children will need something more than higher household spending. “Reversing the decline in married-parent families for children,” as Kearney concludes, “will likely require both economic and social changes.”
In 2004, the late Sara McLanahan published a landmark article called “Diverging Destinies: How Children Are Faring Under the Second Demographic Transition.” The paper was the first scholarly attempt to propose that the decline of the two-parent family in the United States since the 1960’s was intensifying the already unequal life chances for poor and more advantaged children. The insight encompasses an irony that continues to perplex social policy debates: post 1960’s changes in the family which promised people—especially women—greater personal freedom and liberation from traditional constraints was making inequality worse.
Armed with another 20 years of data, Melissa Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland, has now revisited the subject in “The ‘College Gap’ in Marriage and Children’s Family Structure,” a working paper recently published in NBER. Her primary findings won’t surprise anyone keeping track of the scholarship on families and children, but she is able to expand and refine our understanding of the trends that McLanahan saw were creating a dangerous disparity in national well-being—disparities that since then have grown and hardened into a seemingly intractable socio-economic reality.
McLanahan’s article, based on surveys from 1960 to 1990, showed that while most college-educated women continued to raise their children in two-parent homes, that was no longer the case for the least-educated women. A sharp rise in single motherhood among that latter group during those decades was limiting the future of children who were already at a social-economic disadvantage. A third group of what, for simplicity’s sake, we’ll call lower middle-class women (those with a high school degree and perhaps a year or two of college) had a modest shift towards single motherhood but for the most part continued to marry and establish traditional two-parent families. Since that time, as Kearney demonstrates in her new paper, the lower middle-class family has all but collapsed. While the children of the least and highest-educated mothers continue to live in the same general family arrangements as they did in 1990, the percentage of their working-class peers growing up in two-parent families fell from 83% to 60 percent. They now resemble their poorer and least-advantaged sisters more than they do their college-educated peers. In this respect, Kearney’s paper adds to the considerable literature on the “hollowing of the middle class;” the middle class is dwindling while the ranks of the lower skilled and affluent grow further apart.
Taking advantage of a growing body of disaggregated data since “Diverging Destinies” was published—as well as a mounting interest in racial gaps—Kearney also delves into family differences between identity groups. At one end of the spectrum, a strong majority (77%) of white children and an even larger share of Asian children (88%) live with their married parents. In the middle are the 62% of Hispanic children living with their married parents and at the low end are 38% of black children (all 2019 numbers). The “college gap,” as the author calls it, holds for all four of the largest racial and ethnic groups, though there are notable differences between them. Black children are by far the least likely of the four groups to live with married parents, but they have a substantially better chance of doing so if their mother has a college degree: 60% of black children with college-educated mothers have both parents in the house compared to a mere 30% for both the other black education groups. Like the population as a whole, children of the lower middle class in all identity groups saw the biggest decline in two-parent households between 1980 and 2019. This pattern holds for Asians as well, but mothers of all education levels are far more likely to be married than mothers of other racial groups.
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Empty Lofts & Vacant Stages
Choirs may “age out”—the older members simply can’t (or don’t want to) climb the steps anymore, and the younger people who would replace them want to worship with their families rather than spend half the service on a platform or in a loft, especially in churches where there is no children’s church or age-segregated worship. Sometimes members come to prefer singing with their congregational neighbors rather than being more or less sung at by an amplified, center-stage team.
Choirs (and their casual, modern descendants worship teams and praise bands) have been near-ubiquitous in Reformed churches for less than two centuries, but just like government programs, once instituted these groups are difficult to disband even though their historical pedigree is weak. Arrangements may be changed (from choir to praise team), expanded, or downsized, but any pastor or session/consistory knows that messing with the music is akin to playing with fire.
The music-loving Welsh even had a term (cythraul canu) for problems and strife caused by music and choirs. Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones sometimes referred to it in English: the devil in the singing. Many pastors and church officers have understood the concept all too well, resisting change and preferring the known “devil” to the unknown one.
But change does happen. Diminution or even elimination of church “music programs” is not completely unknown.
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Clothed in Righteousness
I now have a whole new perspective on my “robe of righteousness” whenever someone dresses me! The Lord Jesus Christ is our garment of praise, our robe of righteousness, our garment of salvation. Put him on today and delight in all that he sacrificed to clothe you in something so precious, so priceless… his righteousness.
For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.
Galatians 3:27
I often wish I could dress myself. I can’t pull on a sweater, button a jacket, or hike up a pair of slacks. This frustrating predicament has driven me at times to God for help. And isn’t it like the Lord to give not only grace, but insight. I was reading today’s verse and decided to hunt down other references to clothes.
Isaiah 61:10 says,
I delight greatly in the Lord…for he has clothed me with garments of salvation and arrayed me in a robe of righteousness.
There’s a similar reference in Revelation 19:8. Even back at the Garden of Eden, it was God who provided skins to clothe Adam and Eve after the Fall.
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Latter Glory
Haggai 2:9 isn’t predicting a future physical temple to be built at some point in Jerusalem in the end times. The words of the Lord in that verse are about what Christ would accomplish in himself and with his church. The word of the Lord told Haggai’s contemporaries that something greater than their temple was coming. And Jesus of Nazareth told his generation, “Something greater than the temple is here.”
Weighing in at only two chapters, the book of Haggai is underappreciated among the prophetic books. But this book contains expectations about the future that have to do with Christ and his church.
A Rebuilt Temple
In approximately 520 BC, Haggai and Zechariah ministered to reinvigorate the complacent Israelites. The Israelites had attended to their paneled houses while leaving the temple of God in ruins. The reason for the ruined temple was the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC. Now, more than a generation later, the temple should have been fully rebuilt by those who returned from exile. Yet decades passed without the temple being completed.
Haggai told them the word of the Lord: “Go up to the hills and bring wood and build the house, that I may take pleasure in it and that I may be glorified” (Hag. 1:8).
The rebuilt temple, however, was less impressive than the former temple under Solomon. The Solomonic temple had been a work of grandeur and beauty. The rebuilt temple was not like this.
The word of the Lord addressed the people, “Who is left among you who saw this house in its former glory? How do you see it now? Is it not as nothing in your eyes?” (Hag. 2:3).
The “former glory” referred to the first temple, the one Solomon built. The rebuilt temple in the days of Haggai was inferior to it. Their present temple was not as glorious as in the days of David’s son.
Latter Glory
But the present state of things wouldn’t last forever. God said, “I will fill this house with glory” (Hag. 2:7). A temple being filled with God’s glory is reminiscent of earlier texts, as when the glory of God filled the tabernacle (Exod. 40:34) and also Solomon’s temple (1 Kgs. 8:10–11). Interestingly, in the days of Haggai there was no report that the glory of God filled the rebuilt temple. God simply says, “I will fill this house with glory” (Hag. 2:7). But when?
According to Haggai 2:9, “The latter glory of this house shall be greater than the former, says the LORD of hosts.” Now ponder that promise. The Lord is speaking of future glory, future temple glory. And this future glory would be greater than not just their present disappointing temple but greater than the former glorious temple in Solomon’s day.
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