November 12,
1999
Column #950
LEADERS IN THREE STATES TAKE STEPS TO CUT DIVORCE
RATES
Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has
become the first leading public or religious leader in America to declare a
''marital emergency'' in his state and to call for a ''50 percent cut in the
divorce rate'' beginning in the state and across the country by the year
2010.
How? He proposed that a ''new
Community Marriage Policy'' be established in ''all communities of
Arkansas.''There is a limit to what a government can do. Government cannot
pass laws to change the hearts of men and women, but it can encourage
churches, synagogues and people of faith to unite together to help people
prepare for marriage,'' he said to hundreds of pastors and lay leaders who
gathered to attend a Governor's Conference on the Family Oct. 23.
In Wisconsin a proposal by Assembly
Speaker Scott Jensen became law last week that will hire a person in state
government to work with the clergy and civic leaders in developing
Community Marriage Policies across Wisconsin. It was the first such job in
America.
''We spend hundreds of millions of
dollars every year in our state dealing with the fallout of failed marriages
and broken homes,'' said Jensen. ''It just makes common sense that we make
an investment on the front end to strengthen marriages around our state.''
In Louisiana, another state-wide
initiative to create Community Marriage Policies came from the Louisiana
Family Forum, a non-profit group affiliated with Focus on the Family. It
organized clergy in Baton Rouge and Alexandria to sign a CMP last week and
gathered two clergy groups in Shreveport to consider a similar step to cut
the divorce rate.
A rabbi joined Protestant pastors
and Catholic priests in Alexandria, for example, signing the Central
Louisiana Community Marriage Agreement which pledges an end to quickie
weddings, by requiring ''a minimum of four months of marriage preparation''
that includes ''a minimum of four premarital counseling sessions utilizing
the scriptures, a premarital inventory and intensive education.''
They also pledged to ''train mature
married couples to serve as mentors to those who are engaged, newlywed or
experience marriage difficulties.'' Among those to be recruited to help
troubled marriages are Mentor Couples ''whose own marriages were once in
trouble.''
In fairness, I must disclose a
personal interest in these developments. Each of these leaders asked my wife
and I to speak about how Community Marriage Policies are bringing down
divorce rates in dozens of cities. We have helped the clergy of 116 cities
adopt these reforms and have been in awe of the results which are not wholly
explicable.
Nationally, there has only been a
1.3 percent decline in the number of divorces nationally from 1,179,000
divorces in 1979 to 1,163,000 in 1997. But with a CMP in a two county corner
of Northwest Arkansas, they fell 6 percent in one year, saving 150 marriages
and 7 percent in Eau Claire in two years. In Kansas City, Kansas and two
suburban counties, divorces fell from 1,530 in 1995 to 1,001 in 1997, a
remarkable 35 percent plunge in two years.
Most astonishing is El Paso, which
had 5,126 divorces in 1996 when clergy adopted a Community Marriage Policy
(CMP) in September of that year. There were 5,009 the next year, a big drop
to 4,041 in 1998 and if the pattern of the first eight months of 1999 holds
up for four more months, there will be only 1,919 divorces this year
according to the county clerk's office. ''That is a 63 percent drop. I
am incredulous,'' said Barney Field, Director of El Paso for Jesus.
The CMP is only partly responsible for that
enormous plunge in divorces. Field convinced the El Paso Times to publish
the entire New Testament, in daily segments through 1997, so that a person
could read each segment in five minutes, during a ''Year of the Bible.'' In
1998, ''The Year of the Family,'' the paper published a daily story
featuring a key family value such as honesty.
These steps have transformed the
culture in El Paso from selfishness - which destroys marriages - to
selflessness, which builds them.
It is proof that Gov. Huckabee's
dream of cutting the divorce rate in half is realistic. In fact, Bishop
Kevin Mannoia, President of the conservative National Association of
Evangelicals, attended the 50th anniversary meeting of the liberal
National Council of Churches of Christ in Cleveland this week and challenged
them and Roman Catholics to join in making marriage such a priority that the
nation's divorce rate would drop by 50 percent, saving 600,000 marriages a
year by 2010.
It is achievable. If only one-third
of America's 300,000 churches trained 10 Mentor Couples each, there would be
one million Mentor Couples who could easily save 600,000 marriages.
This is a goal that America's
Christian churches might pledge to work toward at an American Marriage
Summit to be held next year, in honor of the 2000th anniversary of the birth
of Jesus, who said, ''What God has joined together, let no man put
asunder.''
Copyright 1999 Michael J. McManus. |