Culture and morals shape our direction more than politics

Daniel Patrick Moynihan / Wikimedia Commons

Timothy S. Goeglein writes at The American Conservative, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan

was right, and not only about black families.

...The most controversial study he ever wrote, the one that propelled him to national attention, was published 50 years ago this year—an event worth recalling because “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” also known as “the Moynihan Report,” focused on the direction of the American black family and the conditions under which children were being raised. Eventually his research would illuminate reasons for the breakdown of much of the American nuclear family in the five decades to follow.

He wrote in 1965 that “The fundamental problem … is that of family structure. The evidence—not final but powerfully persuasive—is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling.” On the day his report was released, about one quarter of black kids were living only with their mothers. Moynihan called this a crisis, as indeed it was, but 50 years on between 70 and 75 percent of all black Americans are now born out of wedlock, a tripling of the trend Moynihan had spotted. More than half of Hispanic children are also born out of wedlock today, and 29 percent of white babies.

The goal of the Moynihan Report, he said, had been to begin a serious national conversation about the implications of those sizable numbers of out-of-wedlock births and what they said about the condition of the family and marriage. His fellow liberals believed that the social and cultural pathologies Moynihan had identified could be effectively addressed by an historic expansion of the federal government. President Johnson’s War on Poverty, launched in 1964, was defined in part by a series of programs that would intervene against family and marriage breakdown, helping to arrest, reverse, and eventually eradicate the problems that Moynihan had identified.

But Moynihan was skeptical. Government could not tuck a child into bed at night; government could not save a marriage; government could not help a broken family fall in love again. These were, he said, primarily cultural problems and not economic or political ones—a bold assertion at a time when trust in big government was embraced by members of both parties.

The Manhattan Institute’s Jason Riley — who has written about the continuing relevance of the Moynihan Report — says Johnson’s Great Society programs began a devastating tendency: “Marriage was penalized and single parenting was subsidized. In effect, the government paid mothers to keep fathers out of the home — and paid them well.”

For decades,” he continues, “research has shown that the likelihood of teen pregnancy, drug abuse, dropping out of school, and many other social problems grew dramatically when fathers were absent.” Riley cites a 2002 study by researchers William Comanor and Llad Phillips of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Their conclusions are sobering: “the most critical factor affecting the prospect that a male youth will encounter the criminal justice system is the presence of his father in the home.”

...Lest there be any thought that these trends have only affected black people, nothing could be further from the truth: according to the 2010 census, for the first time in American history more than half of all babies born to American women 30 years of age and under were born out of wedlock.

In 1995, looking back at his four decades in public life, Moynihan was asked what had been the biggest transformation he had observed: “The biggest change, in my judgment, is that the family structure has come apart all over the North Atlantic world.”

So how to think about the moral revolution we are living through a half-century after Moynihan published his famous analysis? It seems to me that culture still leads and is upstream from what is happening in the politics of either party. Morals and manners — more than legislation — primarily shape the direction of great nations. Any hope for regeneration will likely arise from our families with active and involved fathers, churches that foster family cohesiveness, and various ministries and nonprofits that make strong, nuclear families a priority.

The enduring urgency of Moynihan’s work after 50 years confirms what his friend George Will said about “the ecology of a nation,” namely that “the most important business of one generation is the raising of the next generation.”

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