Are some of Uncle Sam’s efforts to strengthen marriage doing more harm than good?
Since 2006, the federal government has spent upwards of $100 million annually to run programs that promote marriage skills in low-income communities. The results of these expenditures have been underwhelming.
What’s worse, these less-than-compelling results have crowded out private action and created the widespread and false conclusion that all efforts to strengthen marriages are fruitless.
To understand the vast gap in efficacy between government work to promote healthy marriages and the work of civil society, one privately funded project, now called Communio, worked with local organizers and churches to produce a sharp decline in divorce in Jacksonville, Fla., by 24% over three years. The program cost just 0.8% of the cost per person of the federal program, which was created during the Bush administration.
When they crafted the program, lawmakers correctly understood that the lack of human capital, educational attainment, and economic mobility were frequent downstream consequences of a retreat from marriage. Their mistake was to conclude that the importance of marriage meant the federal government ought to get directly into the business of improving marital skills.
Although small coin by federal standards, the $100 million in annual funding to launch new programs was huge money for a nascent area of civil society. Comparatively, private funding for community-based marriage philanthropy was well below $5 million nationally.
The influx of federal funds made the private money seem irrelevant. It incentivized civil society to secularize. This was a major strategic error.
You see, those most deeply motivated to help struggling marriages are frequently fueled by religious, and particularly, Christian faith. These marriage champions attend church, where they have robust social networks to tap into for volunteers and support. But federal funding to help marriages could not be spent on Christian or religious programs.
The few large givers in this new space saw the federal funding as a success. With the feds stepping in, private giving could now go elsewhere. And it did.
Stuck between a pile of money and a hard place, it’s no surprise that this early stage marriage movement federalized.
“Marriage Incorporateds,” these secular, community-based marriage strengthening nonprofit groups, multiplied. Under encouragement from the Bush administration, a trade association of such entities formed. They learned how to apply for federal grants, a tedious process that is nonetheless much faster and more certain process than the hard and unpredictable work of cultivating a coalition of sustaining private givers.
Federal programs proliferated. But their designers had failed to wrestle with one key problem of creating an entirely new government-supported nonprofit sector.
At what point do prospective beneficiaries go to an organization they have never heard of in order to get help that they don’t know they need? This helps explain why, conservatively, the federal program cost more than $5,000 per person served. (Some estimates range as high as $11,500 per person for some grantees.)
Compare this with the privately funded Communio, previously called the Culture of Freedom Initiative. This program, in helping churches deliver life-changing help for far less, discovered that churches can become the catalyst for healthy marriage culture, because they can do what the government can never do, they can love.
Love and mission allow churches to tap into a network of volunteers and existing staff to run and deliver programs. Communio provided 21st century tools of marketing and outreach, along with ministry best practices, and helped churches reduce their divorce rates by a factor of 1 out of 4 in three years. This all came at a cost of just $45 per person served and falling.
There is a huge gap in civil society. A recent Barna study, commissioned by Communio, revealed that churches under-resource marriages. Eighty percent of evangelical churches, 82%of Catholic parishes, and 94% of mainline churches report spending zero percent of their budgets on marriage ministry. Just 28% of the churches surveyed had a substantive marriage ministry.
The federal government cannot fix marriage, but churches can. Filling the marriage ministry gap could fix our nation’s family crisis.
J.P. De Gance is founder and president of Communio a privately funded organization that equips churches to launch relationship strengthening movements in their communities.
