Family Transformed: Religion, Values, and Society in American Life

Despite the dismally familiar statistics about divorce rates and broken homes, most Americans see family life as the "loving, playful, caring heart of what makes life worth living, and a society worth living in," says Emory sociologist Steve M. Tipton, who has joined with Emory legal historian John Witte, Jr. to co-edit a new book about the changing forms and norms of modern families. Family Transformed: Religion, Values, and Society in American Life, published through Emory's Center for the Study of Law and Religion (CSLR), investigates the current state of modern families, the rapid pace at which families are changing and growing more diverse, and their place in the larger arena of public life. The book is one of several new volumes released in conjunction with the CSLR's research project, "Sex, Marriage and Family and the Religions of the Book." "We wanted to explore families as moral dramas, not just collections of statistics or snapshots," says Tipton. "Families are constantly shaped and reshaped by shifting texts and contexts, traditions and liturgies, laws and customs, within the societies and cultures of which they are parts and products. American families today have grown both more regulated and deregulated, marketized and therapeutized, secularized and sacralized anew." To widen the conversation around the family table and dig deeper into these paradoxes, this volume brings together scholars from the fields of anthropology, demography, ethics, history, law, philosophy, primatology, psychology, sociology and theology, who observe the family through the viewfinder of their diverse disciplines to reveal a bigger, more panoramic picture of its drama. Surprisingly, the news isn't all bad. For instance, while it's true that half of all marriages end in divorce, a third of all children are born to single mothers, a fourth of all pregnancies end in abortion, and one in six American children live in poverty, economist Robert Michael makes clear this is not the whole story. For the past 20 years or so, Michael says, about 4 million babies have been born annually, 49 out of every 50 U.S. couples now choose to stay married each year, and two of every three divorced women remarry. We marry later, have fewer children, and finish parenting earlier in life, note Claude Fischer and Michael Hout. Yet Americans still yearn for lifelong love and prefer the household of a married couple with children to living on their own. More Americans now spend more of their lives in marriage than several generations ago, given longer life spans and better health, pregnancy planning, and infertility treatment. Standards for a good marriage have risen and exits from bad marriages have widened in light of growing values of self-attainment and independence, especially for women, with marriage now more often delayed or broken by choice than blocked by poverty or dissolved by death. Children raised by single parents and families fragmented by divorce have multiplied