Recently, Georgia State University professor Ben Scafidi released a study on the economic effects of the destruction of the American family.  The study argues that single parent families—particularly those headed by single mothers—draw more on government aid programs than do traditional, two parent households.  The resulting drain is more $112 billion a year.  Scafidi, while not making a formal recommendation, observed that legislatures should consider the obvious answer:  find ways to strengthen the family.  Almost immediately criticism arose from various corners of academia, primarily questioning the “effectiveness” of marriage programs.  In short, critics are in favor of pursuing any number of other programs, but are “skeptical” of any program focused on marriage.  As one put it, “"We're now nearing 40 percent of kids in America born out of wedlock…I can't fathom that those marriage programs, even with increased investment, are going to reduce that."

In the end, this situation will probably be another case of how criticisms of “traditional” values are often self-fulfilling in the American context.  By adopting the approaches and ideas of the modern world, conservatives and Christians frequently predestine themselves for failure, and therefore damage their credibility in the culture wars.    

First off, we need to note that the study is clearly right when it says that failing marriages are the primary issue at hand here.  Any solution that fails to take that into account (such as better education for single mothers) is really only addressing symptoms, not the disease.  For instance, educated single mothers may earn more, but still won’t be home to raise and educate.  Without a father and with their mothers often absent by necessity, these children will hopefully be better fed and clothed, but will still lack the all-important guidance to really succeed in life.  This is clearly better than the alternative of growing up with absent parents and in abject poverty, but it still isn’t a real answer to the problem.   

Secondly, the sad fact is that the critics of the proposed marriage programs are probably right.  It is quite doubtful that we as a society would see any significant result from even the best funded government-sponsored marriage counseling.  Any doubters have only to look as far as the closest public school.  We have been throwing billions of taxpayer dollars at education for decades, and we have seen it progress from bad to worse, over all.  What makes us think that there will be some magic difference in throwing wads of cash at a different target?   

At issue here is the fact that while American conservatives and evangelicals claim (hereafter amalgamated into “social conservatives”) to espouse a significantly different worldview from the dominant secular humanist norm, they have, in fact, adopted their opponents’ views to a large extent.  Like their opponents, their proposals often address only the symptoms of a problem. 

While social conservatives are guilty of this in any number of ways, the one that matters here is the acceptance of the idea that human beings can be changed from the top down through government intervention.  This is a very old idea that really hit the fan with the “Enlightenment” and takes for granted the very anti-historical idea that human beings are all inherently good.  If that is true, then people in bad situations aren’t there by their own choosing; something else put them there and if that something is removed, they will revert to their natural state of goodness.  This is, in theory, what allows large government-led programs to work.  If we affect the conditions surrounding people, people by their very nature will respond positively.  It should work like a gigantic, social machine, and who better to keep a machine that large working properly than a central government?

Social conservatism in general (and the Christian worldview it originated from), on the other hand, approaches these questions on an individual basis.  Human beings have an inherent bent towards evil and will continue to follow evil until the individual—not the society—decides otherwise.  As such, the emphasis in Christian and conservative circles has almost always been on individual choices and individual accountability (see The Tragedy of American Compassion by Marvin Olasky).   This is obviously a much more personal and less mechanical approach to social change, and the interference of a huge bureaucracy that reduces people to numbers actually tends to get in the way rather than make this more efficient.

Simple reality should have taught us by now that the secular humanist approach is wrongheaded.  A look at the mess that western education, culture, and government have become in the late Twentieth Century should be enough to convince most people.  (If not, I would need more space than an op-ed to do so.) 

So, when social conservatives argue for bigger and better government programs in favor of their own agendas, they are in fact damaging their own cause.  They are de facto adopting the very worldview they claim to be critiquing, and with it they are accepting the same weaknesses they themselves have pointed out.  Government programs won’t fix the marriage crisis any more than they have fixed abstinence, education, politics, crime, war, or any of the other myriad issues they’ve addressed.   They can never get at the underlying problems because they rarely treat people as individual moral agents who must make individual decisions and be held accountable.  Millions, perhaps billions, of dollars are expended, and no final solutions are found.  This, of course, leads to guilt by association:  Since traditional values social programs thus framed do not produce lasting change, people argue that the moral structure behind them must also be faulty. 

Let me add that I personally believe that there is a place for governmental action, but it must be shaped and evaluated in a clear-headed, commonsense way.  The government can at times effectively alleviate immediate suffering, which allows for more meaningful change to take place.  To adapt an old cliché, teaching a man to fish may feed him for a lifetime, but will do him little good if he starves to death before he can learn how.  At the same time, these programs must be hardheaded and realistic; the people they help must always know that they can’t and shouldn’t come to expect temporary aid to replace permanent self sufficiency.

Social conservatives need to take a hard look at themselves and then try to put real, consistent solutions to social issues into action.  We must return to an emphasis on individual responsibility and work for cultural change on a more basic level and not simply assume the government must be our primary tool.  Perhaps, it’s time we offered truly original responses, instead of relying on systems and approaches we ourselves have often critiqued as failures.