A recent study from Barna reveals that fewer Americans are getting married today, but most still believe marriage is important and they want to get married someday.
According to Barna, only 46% of U.S. adults are currently married, down from two-thirds in 1950. The decline largely seems to be due to people waiting longer to marry. The average age for first marriage has risen since 1950. Men now marry at 30, on average, and women marry at age 28 – 29.
The good news is most unmarried adults still want to get married. Among Gen Z, 81% say they value marriage, and 78% hope to marry someday. So while cultural attitudes may be changing, marriage is a deeply desired goal for most Americans.
Barna also found that divorce rates have remained steady, with about 18% of adults reporting they’ve been divorced and more than half of divorced adults reporting that they have remarried.
One concerning trend is the growing acceptance of cohabitation. Barna noted that 58% of all adults—including 42% of practicing Christians—now say it’s “wise” to live together before marriage.
Overall, married Arkansans dropped from 51% of the population in 2010 to 49.8% in 2024.
Cohabitation could be one explanation for the rising percentage of Arkansans who have never married, but the data isn’t clear.
Despite cultural changes, Americans—including young people—still believe marriage matters. That’s good news for Arkansas’ families and churches who understand that strong marriages are the key to building strong communities.
Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.
Years ago, before Epstein, the #MeToo movement, or even same-sex “marriage,” talk show host and Jewish theologian Dennis Prager wrote a fascinating article called “Judaism’s Sexual Revolution.” In it, he described how the pagan world was a sexual free-for-all that debased women and children in the service of male lust. Nearly every aspect of life was sexualized. The pagan gods engaged in no-holds-barred sex, and so did the people. As philosopher Martha Nussbaum, quoted by Prager, wrote, children and women were “very often treated interchangeably as [simple] objects of [male] desire.”
The very same awful treatment of God’s image bearers is on display again in the revelations emerging from the Epstein files. An incredible number of victims were trafficked and abused. An incredible number of evildoers were involved. A bunch of powerful people worked to keep it all hidden. That so much evil could have continued for so long staggers the imagination.
A remarkable difference today is that, unlike pre-Christian pagan societies, such behavior is considered evil rather than normal. That’s because the claim that God created sex only for a man and a woman in marriage was so revolutionary. As Prager wrote,
This revolution forced the sexual genie into the marital bottle. It ensured that sex no longer dominated society, it heightened male-female love and sexuality (and thereby almost alone created the possibility of love and eroticism within marriage), and it began the arduous task of elevating the status of women.
As Christianity, which shared the Genesis account of creation, grew and expanded in influence, it collided with Roman paganism, which also victimized women and children. Except for some in the elite class, Roman women were often treated worse than Roman cattle. Even upper-class women were little more than possessions, and when it came to sexuality, they were at their husband’s beck and call and could be disposed of at will.
Slave women, who were a full third of Rome’s female population, could expect beatings and rape. The “fortunate” ones were sold into prostitution. Unwanted girls were left to die of exposure.
Into that world came Christianity, specifically the writings of St. Paul. As historian Sarah Ruden wrote in her 2010 book, Paul Among the People, to call Paul an “oppressor of women,” as modern scholars do, could “hardly be more wrong.”:
It is profoundly ignorant to think of the Apostle Paul as a dour proto-Puritan descending upon happy-go-lucky pagan hippies, ordering them to stop having fun.” On the contrary, “Paul’s teachings on sexual purity and marriage were adopted as liberating in the pornographic, sexually exploitive Greco-Roman culture of the time . . .
Christianity “worked a cultural revolution,” Ruden wrote, “restraining and channeling the male Eros, elevating the status of both women and of the human body, and infusing marriage—and marital sexuality—with love.” In Ruden’s words, Christian ideas about marriage were “as different from anything before or since as the command to turn the other cheek.”
“No wonder,” Prager wrote, that the “improvement of the condition of women has only occurred in Western civilization.” It is also no wonder that biblical sexual morality was so despised by the ancient pagans in power. Not because it robbed them of “fun,” but because they could no longer rationalize their predations.
Of course, modern pagans also despise Christian sexual morality, but they are also forced to borrow from it as they condemn the kind of horrific treatment of women and children revealed in the Epstein files. The “uncomfortable truth about the Epstein accusations,” as Paul Anleitnerposted on X, is that…
We only find them morally reprehensible because of Christianity.
Before the spread of Christianity, “civilized” Greek and Roman elites openly flaunted underage s*x slaves. This was normal. Emperor Hadrian built an entire city in honor of his favorite boy. We’ve heard for decades that Christianity is a barrier to moral progress, but if you undercut the moral foundations of Christianity from the West, culture reverts back to pagan norms.
That is why it’s so tragic when Christians abandon the clear, life-giving vision of human sexuality that liberated the pagan world. Yet that’s what many have done, even thinking themselves “loving” and “tolerant” in the process. It is, in fact, cruel—not loving—to withhold truth from broken people in a confused culture.
And that is not our only betrayal. To protect churches, Christian institutions, and favored leaders, Christians have often turned a blind eye to, or even covered up abuse, harassment, or worse happening within. That’s a betrayal of people made in the image of God, as well as of the Truth that can set them—and us—free.
In other words, the correct response to our failure to live up to the biblical vision of human dignity is not to pat ourselves on the back for that vision. Rather, it is to confess our own hypocrisy and to repent of our own sins. No matter who is implicated in this horror, we should pray that, as Jesus said, “there is nothing hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light.”
We should also pray that the long, continued, evil efforts to keep these files hidden will fail, and that God will bring justice that is long overdue. Finally, we should, as professor Paul deHart posted on X, “Thank God that pagan morality was overthrown.” If it had not been, there would be no movement to reveal this evil, punish the evildoers, and offer the victims justice.
Copyright 2026 by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Reprinted from BreakPoint.org with permission.
In its press coverage of the march, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette quoted a representative from the Arkansas Abortion Support Network who said, “I would love to see the same number of people and churches come out to stand for the lives of the children we already have here in Arkansas. … I would love to see that same energy directed toward lowering our state’s maternal mortality rate and addressing the infant mortality rates that have been rising since abortion was fully banned in Arkansas.”
The truth is, contrary to what many people claim, pro-lifers — and Christians as a whole — are among those who are most likely to support women and children, and they tend to be more charitable than the general population.
In fact, researchers have written about this topic for many years.
A recent report from our friends at the Charlotte Lozier Institute shows pro-life pregnancy resource centers provided hundreds of millions of dollars in goods and services to families in 2024. Many of these charities offer everything from pregnancy tests and ultrasounds to adoption referrals and parenting classes to maternity clothes, diapers, and baby formula — all typically free of charge.
Barna Research has also found that practicing Christians are more than twice as likely as the general population to adopt children. Barna writes, “Catholics are three times as likely. And evangelicals are five times as likely to adopt as the average adult.” Barna has also found Christians are more likely to welcome sibling groups, older youth, and children with special needs.
A 2022 survey by LifeWay Research found 44% of Protestant churchgoers say their congregation and its leaders are proactively involved with adoption and foster care.
On a much broader level, Pew Research has found that religious Americans are more likely to support charity and give to the poor, writing:
Among people who pray daily and attend services weekly, 45% also say they volunteered in the past week (including 23% who did so mainly through a church or other religious organization). Just 28% of Americans who are not highly religious say they volunteered in the past seven days. The gap is even bigger when it comes to helping the poor: 65% of the highly religious say they donated money, time or goods to help the poor in the past week, compared with 41% of all other U.S. adults.
Studies show churches, charities, religious colleges and universities, and people of faith as a whole may provide as much as $1.2 trillion worth of value to the American public.
Christians and churches support women with unplanned pregnancies, and they provide families for children in need of adoption and foster care. They always have. That is something to celebrate.
Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.
