When I first heard of the concept of "Covenant Marriage", my gut reaction was that I simply couldn't see the point. It's not just Julian's excellent point in the first page of this thread, that "I don't see what the difference is between covenant marriages and a vanilla marriage with an especially specific and restrictive pre-nup," but it also struck me that if you, as a couple, intend to take your marriage very seriously, there's nothing stopping you from doing so. You don't need a special class of contract; all you need is the will. Less than five years ago, at the age of twenty-nine, I'd never seriously envisioned myself being married. Then I met a woman whom, I discovered in the course of a few years, I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, and we've now been married for two and a half years. I don't need some special "Covenant Marriage" to cement my resolve; all I need is the power of my own convictions.
So what is this "Covenant Marriage" really, except some Evangelical Protestant form of showing off? "Oh, our commitment to our marriage must be stronger than yours, because we've got a Covenant Marriage."

I hadn't considered the potential ramifications via-à-vis the separation of church and state, but the further I've gotten in this thread, the more concerned I've become, to the point that my opinion of "Covenant Marriage" has shifted from "stupid but harmless" to "stupid and potentially quite dangerous."

Bikerdad, I'd like to refer you to this very informative post by Julian earlier in this thread, because it strikes me that your perception of "the 1,000-year institution of covenant marriage" seems to have very little basis in historical reality. Not only was there never a shortage of illegitimate children before no-fault divorces, there was never a shortage before legal divorces entirely. William the Conqueror, of Battle of Hastings (1066) fame, was previously known as "William the Bastard" because that was what he was: the illegitimate (and only) son of Robert, Duke of Normandy. There are entire families in the United Kingdom who bear the name of "Bastard" because their ancestor was the illegitimate offspring of some mediaeval nobleman.

Evangelical Protestant? You've been drinking too much kool-aid if you think this is an Evangelical Protestant construction. Indissoluble monogamy between one man and one woman has been promoted by the Roman Catholic Church as the definition of marriage for more than a 1,000 years, and by the 12th century it had triumphed over the resource polygyny of the Germanic tribes, making it the reigning paradigm for the next 800 years. This is what's known as the European Marriage Model, is agreed upon by mainstream historians, and is considered to be one of the elements resulting in the ascendancy of Western civilization. Furthermore, the idea that marriage is the only appropriate locus of sex is not the legacy of the Purtians, contrary to Julian's erroneous attribution, but predates the Puritans by more than half a millenia. It should be noted that Roman civilization was also fundamentally monogamous. Just to head of the exception argument, here's a similar example of what "fundamental" means in this context. The Roman military was fundamentally an infantry force. Did they have cavalry? Yes. Did they have artillery? Yes. Does that alter the fact that their fundamental composition was a buncha guys marching on foot and going mano a mano? Nope.



I think you would need to define "shortage" for your claim to have any meaning. If you define shortage as "well, no bastards this year, praise the Lord", then you are correct. If you define an adequate supply of bastards as 10% (i.e., 1/7th the rate of illegitamacy in the present African-American community, 1/4 the rate when Moynihan wrote his prescient report 40 years ago, 1/3 the rate in the white community), you are very, very wrong. Bastardy ran less than 3% until after 1750 in England. In comparison to today, that would seem to be a shortage.

Care to back up you contention with numbers? "Shortage" is such a nebulous term, it demands context. How many divorces out of how many marriages? What was the rate? How does it compare to our current rate?

With bastardy, you're arguing that two examples demonstrate high frequency. How many other English kings were bastards? How many others can you point to who sired bastards? How many bastards did they sire? If you wish, you can even extend your net to the English aristocracy, and you'll still find that the illegitimacy rate until the latter half of the 20th century is remarkably lower than you imagine.

suggested reading: http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/REPLY4.PDF

I was talking about this current "Covenant Marriage" construct introduced in Louisiana, Arizona and Arkansas. Just because it's been given the same name doesn't mean it's the same thing. In fact, one thing that very clearly indicates that it isn't the same thing is that fact that the Catholic church in Louisiana did not look favourably on the concept when it was introduced. This article in the Lawrence Journal-World sums it up:Since the new model "covenant" does provide several options for divorce, "no-fault" included (albeit with a longer waiting period), we're definitely not talking "insoluble monogamy"; thus, despite the similarity in packaging, the product is plainly different. The study Is Covenant Marriage a Policy that Preaches to the Choir? from Bowling Green State University indicates (in Table 6) that couples engaging in new model "covenant marriages" (henceforther, I shall use the ETLA "NMCM") are overwhelmingly likely to be Baptist (44%) or some other form of Protestantism (20.3%). Okay, so Baptist rather than Evangelical, my bad, but then again, this applies specifically to Louisiana. Point ultimately being that nevertheless, the NMCM seems to appeal overwhelmingly to Protestants specifically. In fact, according to the BGSU study, Catholics are less likely to go for NMCMs, and I would speculate that this is because they're quite capable of applying those factors which supposedly turn a regular marriage into a "covenant" privately with the aid of the church, without resorting to some state-sanctioned crutch.

Another reason I'm somewhat bemused at this appeal to tradition is that is seems awfully selective. Adherence to Catholic tradtions is, to put it mildly, not a mainstay in post-Reformation Europe. Actually, a desire to firmly break with a number of those traditions is what sparked the Reformation in the first place, and the Catholic model of marriage is demonstrably one of them. A key feature in many (for all I know, all) varieties of Protestantism is that, while marriage is regarded as monogamous, it is not held to be insoluble. This is famously the primary reason the Church of England came into being in the first place.
That mainstream historians are in agreement on what they mean by the term "European Marriage Model," I'll accept. But I'd greatly like to hear by whom it "is considered to be one of the elements resulting in the ascendancy of Western civilization" because I'm positive that there is nothing even resembling a scientific consensus on that. In David Landes' The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, the author argues that European exceptionalism can be largely attributed to a division between the secular and religious, decentralization of authority and greater emphasis on private property rights. A specific model of marriage doesn't even enter into it.

First off, I'm inclined to say "high frequency" is at least as nebulous a term as my own "shortage." Whatever it means, I wasn't trying to prove that; I was illustrating that it occurred, and that it occurred openly, within the past 1,000 years.

Look, Bikerdad, your original claim in this post, and the one I take issue with was that "a concept that has served Western Civilization for more than 1,000 years" "worked better than the new no-fault regime." I can only interpret this to mean that you attribute such shifts in society, such as increases in the number of children born out of wedlock, to the introduction of "no-fault" divorce. (If this was not what you meant to imply, you're going to have to tell me what you did mean.) That's a pretty strong claim, and I don't see why I should expected to provide evidence to the contrary unless and until you provide some proof to back it up in the first place. I don't intend to dispute that there may have been a steady increase in illegitimate births in the United States in the post-World War II period, but I will not accept unquestioningly that figures from a single country over a period of the past sixty years are automatically applicable to the entirety of "Western Civilization" over the past thousand.

Unfortunately, the material to which you yourself have referred thus far does not back up this claim. For instance, this piece does indeed state that "in early modern England, the illegitimacy rate was usually far less than 3% until after 1750." It should be noted, incidentally, that in repeating this statement, you left a couple of points, namely the specification that this applied to early modern England and makes no reference to mediaeval England, as well as the rather important word "usually." More importantly, however, even the original quote implies that illegitimacy rates rose after 1750. Whatever the reason for that may have been, the can surely have been no causal relationship to the introduction of "no-fault" divorces in the United States over two centuries later.

Furthermore, it does not, for example, counter Julian's (admittedly speculative) point about the origins of "Changeling" myths; when a married woman has a child fathered by someone other than her husband, the child is not born out of wedlock. Nevertheless, I doubt this meshes with the code of personal values which supposedly underpins the concept of a "covenant marriage."

You also mention Daniel Patrick Moynihan's "prescient report." Here again, we have a problem. Moynihan's report was published in 1965, while California became the first state to introduce "no-fault" divorce in 1969. Moynihan's report, moreover, observed (according to this PBS series) that "out-of-wedlock births among blacks had gone up from 17 percent in 1950 to 26 percent in 1965." This marked increase, then, took place over period which ended fours years before "no-fault" divorces started to be introduced. As a result, it is literally incredible that there was a causal relationship between the two.

In conclusion, then, and on the basis of the above, I think I am justified in arguing that (a) the NMCM bears no signifiantly greater relation to any earlier model of "covenant" than the more common form; and that (b) no credible evidence has yet been offered that the NMCM actually addresses the causes of illegitimacy, single parenthood et al. by being more difficult to dissolve, since evidently, the causal relationship between certain worrying societal trends and "no-fault" divorces is by no means an exclusive one. If indeed there is a causal relationship at all, rather than simply a "common cause" fallacy.