"Possibly the Worst Church Website in the World"

Possibly the Worst Church Website in the World: 

Who says Flash is dead?

Yes, it is truly a dreadful website, whether of a church or anything else.

The end of the doofus family man?

The scorn and disdain of which Hollywood and the entertainment industry had held the family man may be finally coming to an end. Though the trope still has a long way to do before it's buried, as Glenn points out,

... with the number of stay-at-home dads doubling over the last decade, their purchasing power will influence advertisers. When women did all the shopping, it was easy to diss men.

We can see this evolution even in the ads of the same company - pcmatic.com. Exhibit A - remember this ad of the helpless, frustrated husband whose independent, assertive wife saves him from his own stupidity? Whether the company got a lot of protests I don't know, but the present ad featuring the same character morphs him into a wise, mentoring dad who patiently helps his daughter. Is this the harbinger of a new trend? Slate thinks so.

Is college worth the price?

Not worth the debt - NYPOST.com

For students, piece of advice No. 1 is: Don’t go into debt. When I went to law school, back in the ’80s, I turned down free rides at a couple of excellent schools to go to Yale Law School, even though it meant taking on a lot of student-loan debt. I’m not sure I’d advise anyone to do the same thing today, even to go to Yale Law, the undisputed king of the law-school rankings — and I’m positive I wouldn’t make a similar tradeoff for many other places, even Harvard Law.

True for undergrad schools, too. As anyone who has helped son or daughter with a college search recently, as I have in the last year (daughter graduated from high school last Friday), sticker shock is endemic.Georgia Tech runs more than $40,000 for non-Georgia residents; their idea of financial aid was for me to borrow $37,400 of it. When I called the financial-aid office to plead, the nice lady I talked to said that they do not give financial aid to non-Georgia applicants (though she did not put it quite so baldly).

Wake Forest offered us $46,000 per year in scholarships and grants. Sound like a lot? It is a lot - but it still would have left us with almost $13,000 to come up with. Sorry, I am too old to take on that kind of debt times four years.

Wake Forest (my alma mater, btw) underscores the real reason there is a higher-education bubble: I cannot see how a baccalaureate degree from the school could possibly be worth almost a quarter-million dollars. Not all bachelor degrees are created equal. Wake is very much a liberal-arts school, probably one of the best such schools in the world.

And good luck getting a job to pay off the commensurate student debt with that degree in medieval German literature.

Wake's law school and business school have proven excellent investments for later return - but as even law professor Glenn Reynolds points out in the Post piece, law schools have been fudging their criteria for post-graduation success for some time and a JD degree pretty much guarantees nothing any more. As one partner-track attorney told me recently, a job-seeking, newly-minted attorney needs to have a diploma from one of the top ten (not ten percent, ten) law schools in the country, and (not or) have graduated in the top fourth of his/her class, to even be considered for interview by most law firms. Don't have that? So sorry.

College payments have to be evaluated the same way as any other spending, by present value and eventual worth. Fewer and fewer top-tier schools can pass that test.

Hymn for Memorial Day

The traditional hymn of both the Royal Navy and the US Navy was originally penned as, "Eternal Father, Strong to Save." I posted the history of the hymn and its subsequent versions here. Here is the version we will use this Sunday. Verse 2 and 5 are my authorship.

USS Arizona Memorial, Pearl Harbor, photo by Donald Sensing

Arlington National Cemetery, Memorial Day 2007.
A young woman weeps for her slain fiance.

The U.S. Marine Memorial, Washington D.C.

US Air Force F-15 fighters' "missing man" formation, in which the lead pilot
 ascends heavenward to memorialize comrades who died.

The Gateway Arch, St. Louis, Miss., noontime Memorial Day 2009,
 photo by Donald Sensing

Litany for Memorial Day

These are Power Point slides saved as JPGs. Each background image was set at 50 percent transparency. The text is from The Book of Worship for United States Forces (1974).

Arlington National Cemetery

National Cemetery of the Pacific (the Punchbowl), photo by Donald Sensing

Here is a blank slide. 

Tomb of the Unknowns, Arlington National Cemetery

Death throes of the Blue Model church

If you want to see a microcosm of the decaying and death of Blue Model organizations, California is a good example for government and The United Methodist Church for religious bodies. Every four years the United Methodist Church convenes its General Conference, the only body that can set the denomination's doctrines and denomination-wide legislation. The GC meets for two weeks and adjourned last week in Tampa, Fla. Methodist Bishop Will Willimon, who attended, sums up the two-week fiasco rather well:

General Conference in Tampa made history as the most expensive ($1,500 per minute!), least productive, most fatuous assemblage in the history of Methodism. Sunday evening’s “A Celebration of Ministry” fiasco was a metaphor for our nearly two weeks at church expense: four hours of belabored supplication by the General Commission on Status and Role of Women, five Ethnic National Plans, Strengthening the Black Church for the 21st Century, United Methodist Men, Girl Scouts, Africa University and a number of other agencies I can’t remember. A subtheme of that long night: even though we can’t cite specific fruit, please don’t force us to change or to expend less on ourselves. 

Even after suffering this abuse, General Conference succumbed to the agencies’ pleadings. In a post-GC blog, Mike Slaughter (who with Adam Hamilton eloquently—and futilely—warned GC that we must change or face certain death) told the truth: “Our denominational systems continue to resist change by protecting archaic structures. From our seminaries to boards and agencies, institutional preservation was a strong resistant influence throughout GC. Entrenched organizational bureaucracies resist accountability …”

I did not attend myself, but one delegate, whom I know, said that more than anything else, this General Conference was about money. That is practically the hallmark of the death paroxysms of Blue Model organizations: who gets how much of a shrinking monetary base. And whatever else it may be, the UMC is one of the bluest of the Blue Model organizations out there.

Probably a review of what the Blue Model is would be useful here. Scholar Walter Russell Mead describes the Blue Model as "The core institutions, ideas and expectations that shaped American life for the sixty years after the New Deal." The problem is that these things,

... don’t work anymore, and the gaps between the social system we’ve inherited and the system we need today are becoming so wide that we can no longer paper them over or ignore them. 

In the old system, both blue collar and white collar workers hold stable jobs, a professional career civil service administers a growing state, with living standards for all social classes steadily rising while the gaps between the classes remain fairly stable, and with an increasing ‘social dividend’ being paid out in various forms: longer vacations, more and cheaper state-supported education, earlier retirement, shorter work weeks and so on. Graduate from high school and you were pretty much guaranteed lifetime employment in a job that gave you a comfortable lower middle class lifestyle; graduate from college and you would be better paid and equally secure. 

Life would just go on getting better. From generation to generation we would live a life of incremental improvements — the details of life would keep getting better but the broad outlines of our society would stay the same. The advanced industrial democracies of had in fact reached the ‘end of history’: this is what ‘developed’ human society looked like and there would be no more radical changes because the picture had fully developed. The blue model rested on the post-Second World War industrial and economic system. The ‘commanding heights’ of American business were controlled by a small number of monopolistic and oligopolistic firms. ... 

The stable economic structure allowed a stable division of the pie. Workers (much more heavily unionized then than now) got steady raises and stable jobs. The government got a stable flow of tax revenues. Shareholders got reasonably steady dividends.

Peter Skurkiss of The Buckeye Institute assesses that the Blue Model is in its death throes:

Simply put, the blue model is unsustainable. The compensation, the benefits, and privileges that were afforded to government workers was possible only with an unusually healthy and robust private sector which itself was made possible by the lack of serious foreign competition. That world no longer exists, nor is it ever likely to again. Governors like John Kasich (Ohio) and Scott Walker (Wisconsin) recognize this fact faster than others, but in the end, all states will have to conform to the new reality.

And not just states and governments or corporations at every level. Blue Model institutional churches are going to be swept away by the new reality as well. And so with the United Methodist Church. Here are the portents that bode ill for the UMC, but these portents are true for most any Blue Model organization.

One
The focal point of dissension within Blue Model organizations is money - who gets it and how much. Beside this question, all others pale. The problem for the UMC is that the General Conference is delegated by a huge majority by men and women who grew up under the Blue Model in its heyday and whose personal influence is derived from expertise in navigating Blue Model sub-institutions.

More than anything else, what brings down Blue Model organizations is that the money stream starts drying up. This is what has happened in the UMC. Personal giving among Methodist church members has declined markedly. Much of the decline can be attributed to the ongoing recession, yes, but not all. Besides, charitable giving is as much a matter of habit as devotion. Even households that have recuperated from the recession have not, on the whole, returned to the prior level of giving, mainly because it is no longer a habit.

And so it was that the General Conference was a two-week scramble by the countless special-interest groups of the church to protect their slice of the pie, without, apparently, much caring that the pie is getting ever smaller. If it is true, as Charles de Gaulle observed, that graveyards are full of indispensable men, it is truer that the UMC is more full of boards and agencies whose special-interest constituents would count it as the Apocalypse come in power if they were more than token downsized. As Bishop Willimon puts it, " The Methodist Federation for Social Action received new life, the [General] Board of Church and Society went home unscathed by reform" and pretty much every other entity of the church maintained an even strain.

What all this means is that the main activity of the two weeks of Conferencing was lobbying by countless entities large and small to protect their share of the general budget. This is exactly why Southern Methodist University Prof. Maria Dixon Hall, a delegate to the Conference, wrote that the UMC is "facing slow, agonizing, organizational death."

Again, winning the battle and losing the war became the strategy of the day. The minority point was clear: if we don’t like what you do or we don’t feel like you gave us enough deference, we will shut it down regardless of whom it hurts. Funny, whether it’s Grover Norquist and the Tea Party or the Methodist Federation for Social Action, the rhetoric of organizational hostage-taking has the same effect—polarization, distrust and, in the end, slow, agonizing, organizational death. 

One of my students in Organizational Communication could look at this mess called GC2012 and diagnose the problem immediately: An 18th Century structure cannot sustain a 21st century global organization. We must be willing to let go of the non-essentials to get back to the first fruits and ideals of why we are a People called Methodist.

Two
A second mark of a Blue Model organization in its death throes is that the Old Guard tries to tighten its grip on its power while the Young Turks demand they relinquish.

In the UMC, the Old Guard are the boards and agencies and the spin-off movements and various constituencies of the church. These are 100 percent American and almost all white. The Young Turks are non-U.S. Methodists, mainly Africans, whose numbers are growing rapidly at the same time that domestic American Methodists continue to dwindle. In 2008, 30 percent of delegates came from outside the United States; this year it was 41 percent. No one doubts that in 2020, foreign Methodist delegates will be the majority and that may well happen only four years from now.

Yet U.S. Methodists paid for 99 percent of the Conference's costs despite insistence from foreign delegations that they pay a larger share. To these requests, the US-based UMC said no, even to the Norwegian delegation!

Money is power, they say, and so we see the real meaning of the Golden Rule:



The American wing of the UMC has passed its peak of influence. Money will not buy it back. As Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, puts it, "United Methodists Transition from Liberal to Global."

Unlike the other traditionally liberal-led Mainline denominations, United Methodism is fully global in membership. ... There are 7.5 million United Methodists in the U.S. and 4.5 million overseas, almost all in Africa, mostly in the Congo. With the U.S. church losing about 100,000 members a year (down from 11 million 44 years ago) and the African church gaining over 200,000 a year, the denomination likely will become a majority non-U.S. church in about 10 years or less. ... 

With over 4 million and soon to be 5 million members, the African churches are now too large to ignore. A few liberal activists, in their blogs, complained about Africans from impoverished countries who don't contribute dollars into the denomination now having so much power. But disenfranchising the poor is not a successful battle cry for progressives. Some U.S. liberals quietly try to paint the Africans as primitives who reject enlightened Western liberalism. ... 

Inevitably the growing African membership will alter these preoccupations with American leftist themes. They believe the church's role is primarily evangelistic, not political.

This is the same type of competition and foreign pressure that led to the decay of the political Blue Model. Back to Prof. Mead:

The blue model began to decay in the seventies. Foreign producers began to erode the market share of lazy, sclerotic American firms – like the Big Three automakers. The growth of offshore financial markets forced the financial services industry to become more flexible as both borrowers and lenders were increasingly able to work around the regulations and the oligopolies of the domestic market. ... These days, private sector blue companies can only survive with vast and continuing government support.

But there is no such equivalent entity to prop up the Blue Model UMC. And so the structure will crash. As economist Herbert Stein said 40-plus years ago, "When something can't go on forever, it won't."

I do not mean that the UMC will disappear, although there is still significant shrinkage of the domestic American church yet to come. I mean that the main indicator of the Blue Model Church's demise is plain: The inability of existing organization to help the UMC prosper.

Like other Blue Model entities, the UMC is organized vertically, itself a consequence of America's victory in World War II, which taught the country that organizations with clear boundaries of authority and defined responsibilities are the keys to success. The defining characteristic of Blue Model organizations is a vertical chain of command and layers of supervision. And so the UMC is organized to the hilt: Bishops preside over Conferences (which is what Methodists call dioceses; each year every Conference has a convention, called an Annual Conference, and every four years the general church holds the General Conference. It took me years to understand all this.) Geographical conferences are further divided into districts, each with a superintendent, who exercises supervision of individual pastors. In turn, Conferences (dioceses) are organized into several Jurisdictions, each with its own set of jurisdictional agencies, and the denomination operates 13 general (churchwide) boards and agencies.

The result is practically a textbook example of a vertically-integrated organization, "An organization whose members look up to bosses instead of out to customers. Loyalty and commitment is given to functional fiefdoms, not the overall corporation and its goals." The Old Guard's loyalty, as Mr. Tooley, Bishop Willimon and Prof. Hall point out, is mainly to the "functional fiefdoms" of the Blue Model church and not to either the structures or goals of the emerging UMC in Africa and elsewhere. Yet, once again, the emerging UMC is really emerging while the Blue Model UMC is declining.

This situation is aggravated by an ecclesial equivalent of the dysfunction of government's Blue Model. Prof. Mead puts it thus: "they are poorly equipped to respond nimbly to the fast-changing conditions of America today." And so with the vertical, Blue Model structure of the UMC. American society is rapidly moving to a new model (of sorts) of horizontal organizations, often of self-organized networks that arise as needed as can pass away just as quickly. This is multi-modal and multi-nodal - flexible of purpose and structure and oriented toward purpose and process more than place or personnel. This is 180 degrees out from the way the UMC works now.

Conclusion
Yogi Berra is supposed to have said, "It's easy for forecast the future, especially in retrospect." One thing is for sure: there are many more tears to be shed and agonies to be endured before the nature of UMC of the 21st century is evident. For the next three or four General Conferences (extending to 2028), the Blue Model devotees will try to hang on. Mead:

[C]ulturally and intellectually, bureaucrats and politicians [read: the UMC's general boards and agencies] often remain blue. That is, they think instinctively in the old ways, come up with blue solutions to non-blue problems, and often fail to grasp either the constraints or the opportunities of the new era.

But this will fail because the Blue Model's center is the American branch of the church. And the center cannot hold. Here are some consequences of the breakdown of the Blue Model UMC that are already evident and will become stronger in the coming years:

1. The great majority of the shrinking domestic base of Methodist lay people are not personally invested  in propping up the Blue Model Methodist Establishment -- and so they won't. Their own Blue Model organizations (unions, job security and guaranteed pensions, etc.) have already gone a-glimmering. Lay people increasingly will see no benefit to themselves from maintaining a Blue Model church. Their concerns are almost exclusively related to the local church and its mission and ministries and not to the activities of general boards, denominational ministries or even the "connectional system," a term that not one lay person in 20 can define.
    
2. Lay people and pastors more and more will not accept the bureaucratic inertia and plodding deliberatism of the Blue Model -- and again, will not pay for it. The hierarchical structures of the church must rediscover what servant ministry means and devote themselves to helping local churches and pastors succeed rather than, in usual Blue Model style, issue edicts from Sinai's peak that must be obeyed. Flexibility and responsiveness by church leaders and agencies to the needs of local churches will be key. From bishops down through Conference offices and superintendents, it must become an embedded value that their purpose is to empower, assist and support local churches. The line of support's direction must run down, not up the chain of command, but this is, frankly, exactly opposite of what we have today.
    
3. Church leaders at all levels will become increasingly frustrated by the glacial inability of the General Conference to accomplish anything meaningful regarding to structure and revisions of UMC's Book of Discipline (the canon law of the church). This will strengthen the already-evident movement among lay people toward congregationalism in the church instead of traditional Methodist connectionalism. Churches will increasingly see themselves as franchise operators rather than subordinate offices, and will begin to take increasing liberties with the directive documents of the Church.
    
4. We are long past the day when Methodism as a “brand” was uniquely attractive. It is very naive to expect that the laity or pastors will somehow become more devoted to the Church's connectional system and the work of general boards and agencies than they are now. The great majority of our people attend our churches because of personal relationships and the particular church’s programs and internal ministries, not because the sign says Methodist.
    
5. The growing influence of the foreign Methodists will become the focal point of dissent among American Methodists over the future of the general church. Largely because of Africa's delegations, the routine quadrennial attempt by the gay lobby (eleventh in a row) at the General Conference to liberalize the church's stance on homosexuality was crushed by 61-39 percent, a larger margin than four years ago. Already there is a move by the liberal wing of the church to form a domestic-church-only Conference, but this would essentially schism the Church and leave the General Conference even more directionless than it is now.

Beyond that my crystal ball is cloudy. One thing is for sure - Bob Dylan had it right: "The times, they are a-changing."

Update: Rev. Andy Langford's assessments are similar to mine: "Rearranging the deckchairs of a sinking ship, General Conference tossed the paying passengers overboard and saved the lives of the crew."

New policy of the Tennessee Conference on Pastoral Appointments

This is the text of the email I sent to everyone of our congregation on May 16.

I received a document this week via email from the Columbia District Superintendent with instructions to "familiarize your administrative boards and SPRC committees" with it. There seems little point, in my opinion, of sending it to those folks and not to the congregation at large. I have pasted the text below. If you have questions, I will be glad to receive them and pass them to the district superintendent, but I personally do not want to try to interpret this policy on his behalf. I am informed that this policy is in effect now.

As Kevin Carroll announced a couple of Sundays ago, I have been officially notified that I will be reappointed to serve as Westview's pastor for the coming year. Cathy, Elizabeth and I are blessed to be here and are very grateful for continuing service among you all. Thank you all for your support and friendship of the past two years; we hope to enjoy a long tenure of service here to God and our church.

Here is the verbatim text of the policy:
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Guidelines for Right-Sizing Church Appointments

The history and doctrine of The United Methodist Church give evidence to our connectional ministries. Every local church is related to every other local church in the connection. From the earliest days of our existence we have sought to work together in mission and ministry around the world.

In order to help churches that are struggling to pay their pastor’s salary, their apportionments, and other obligations, the Bishop and Cabinet of the Tennessee Conference have instituted the following guidelines for the appointment of pastors to churches and for realigning churches.

1) Churches that are financially able to pay 100% of their apportionments, pay their pastor(s) a salary and benefits that meets or exceeds the conference equitable compensation guidelines and support their local ministry will be considered for a full-time pastor(s).

2) Churches that request more than one pastor (an Associate Pastor or Deacon) but have not paid their apportionments or paid the Pastor’s Salary and benefits in full in the current or preceding year will not be considered for multiple pastors until the church has shown at least three years of full payment of apportionments and pastor’s salary and benefits.

3) Churches that have paid less than 100% of apportionments in at least one year of the previous ten years may be subject to a reconfiguration of pastoral appointment.

a) In consultation with the District Superintendent, the church may reduce its salary and benefits for the pastor and be appointed a pastor who will serve two or more churches. This will give the pastor a bigger responsibility, more people to serve, and hopefully a more stable ministry setting. It will give the church less salary obligations, less of the pastor’s time, and a higher expectation to pay its apportionments in full. It will also require the laity of the congregation to assume more responsibility for the ministry of the church.  

b) In some cases an ordained elder may be appointed to a charge or parish ministry consisting of several churches and multiple clergy. They may consist of some combination of the following: ordained elder, commissioned elder, deacon, local pastor, supply pastor, lay speaker. The ordained elder in charge will make assignments for pastoral care, preaching, and administration of the sacraments, and will give supervision to the clergy and the churches in the parish ministry. 

4) In a select number of cases (to be approved by the Cabinet and the Commission on Equitable Compensation) churches or charges will be considered for equitable compensation with a portion of the salary paid by the Annual Conference. But in every case the expectation will be that the church will pay its apportionments in full each year that it is on equitable compensation. If it fails to do so, it is subject to losing its salary supplement by the conference, and the church being in a reconfigured mode (see 3a and 3b above).

5) In a few cases (to be approved by the Cabinet) a church may be approved for missional support for a given period of time to enable ministry in a setting that is greatly needed but would otherwise be impossible to provide.

6) In a church in which the apportionments or salary(ies) were not paid in full for the current year, the pastor(s) shall not receive nor accept a salary raise for the ensuing year. It is imperative that the salaries of the connectional church and the missional efforts of the denomination be met as well as the salary of the local pastor and the ministry and missions in the local setting.

The cooperation of everyone will assure that the ministry of the local church, the annual conference, and The United Methodist Church remains strong and faithful to the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is our intent to respond to the Call to Action by the Council of Bishops in a way that fosters a new path of accountability and faithfulness. This accountability will also strengthen our ability to “make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.”

Grave threat to religious freedom being mounted

Summary: 

Certain members of the Congress have proposed an amendment to the United States Constitution that, if ratified, will strip incorporated churches of their Constitutional rights. And not just churches -- any kind of corporation, whether for profit or not for profit, would be stripped of its rights as well.

The amendment does this by specifically defining "people, person, or citizen" to mean only individual human beings and specifically excluding from that definition, "corporations, limited liability companies or other corporate entities."

Background:

The presumptive rationale for the amendment is a Supreme Court decision (Citizens United v. Federal Election Comission) that invalidated the part of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (known as BCRA or “McCain-Feingold”) that restricted corporate expenditures in elections. The amendment's sponsors say that the only way to reverse the Supreme Court's decision is to amend the Constitution. Since the Court held that corporations have Constitutional status as persons before the law (in fact, a longstanding legal principle, not a novel ruling), the amendment therefore dismisses such entities from personhood as Constitutionally defined.

The Amendment

The proposed amendment is called the "People's Rights Amendment," sponsored by US Rep. Jim McGovern (D.-3rd District, Mass.) and is supported by US House minority leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D.-8th District, Calif.) and others. The PRA would amend our Constitution so as to define "person" or any part of "the people," as the Constitution uses the term, to mean only individual human beings. The PRA reads in entirety:

Section 1. We the people who ordain and establish this Constitution intend the rights protected by this Constitution to be the rights of natural persons. 

Section 2. The words people, person, or citizen as used in this Constitution do not include corporations, limited liability companies or other corporate entities established by the laws of any State, the United States, or any foreign state, and such corporate entities are subject to such regulations as the people, through their elected State and Federal representatives, deem reasonable and are otherwise consistent with the powers of Congress and the States under this Constitution. 

Section 3. Nothing contained herein shall be construed to limit the people's rights of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, free exercise of religion, freedom of association and all such other rights of the people, which rights are inalienable.

Rep. McGovern explains it this way:

 

 And Rep. Pelosi says,

 

What this means for America and its churches

UCLA Law School Prof. Eugene Volokh is one of the forty most cited law-faculty members in the country.

These citation counts refer to citations in law review articles, but his works have also been cited by courts. Six of his law review articles have been cited by opinions of the Supreme Court Justices; twenty-one of his works (mostly articles but also a textbook, an op-ed, and a blog post) have been cited by federal circuit courts; and several others have been cited by district courts or state courts.

According to Prof. Volokh, the PRA would "Strip Most Newspapers, Churches, Nonprofits, and Other Corporations of All Constitutional Rights."

So just as Congress could therefore ban the speech of nonmedia business corporations, it could ban publications by corporate-run newspapers and magazines — which I think includes nearly all such newspapers and magazines in the country (and for good reason, since organizing a major publications as a partnership or sole proprietorship would make it much harder for it to get investors and to operate). Nor does this proposal leave room for the possibility, in my view dubious, that the Free Press Clause would protect newspapers organized by corporations but not other corporations that want to use mass communications technology. Section 3 makes clear that the preservation of the “freedom of the press” applies only to “the people,” and section 2 expressly provides that corporations aren’t protected as “the people.” 

Congress could also ban the speech and religious practice of most churches [boldface added], which are generally organized as corporation. It could ban the speech of nonprofit organizations that are organized as corporations. (Congressman McGovern confirms this: “My ‘People’s Rights Amendment’ is simple and straightforward. It would make clear that all corporate entities — for-profit and non-profit alike — are not people with constitutional rights. It treats all corporations, including incorporated unions and non-profits, in the same way: as artificial creatures of the state that we the people govern, not the other way around.”) Congress could ban speech about elections and any other speech, whether about religion, politics, or anything else. It could also ban speech in viewpoint-based ways. 

State legislatures and local governments could do the same. All of them could seize corporate property without providing compensation, and without providing due process. All corporate entities would be stripped of all constitutional rights. Quite a proposal; I blogged more generally about this issue here, but it seems to me that simply listing the consequences of Congressman McGovern’s proposal largely suffices to explain its flaws.

As a clergyman, I will speak (while I can, I suppose) about the effect the PRA would have on churches or other religious assemblies. Prof. Volokh is correct that it is commonplace for a church to be incorporated as a not-for-profit corporation. One big reason is because of tort liability. As a tort lawyer explained at a meeting I attended, if a church is not incorporated and someone is injured on the property, that person can sue the entire membership of the church, each member being named individually in the suit. Because of the established principle of joint and several liability, all members of unincorporated churches can be held financially liable for damages awarded. Each member can be ordered by the court to pay a pro-rata share of the damages. Not only that, every individual church member is potentially liable for the entire amount of the damages. This has happened, said this trial lawyer, and the only way to prevent it it to make the church a legal entity, or "person," under the law.

The PRA would remove the protection completely that incorporation affords because, as Rep. McGovern says explicitly, "corporate entities" would not have Constitutional rights -- at all.

Prof. Volokh also points out that the only present arrangement that would escape the PRA's tentacles is a partnership. After noting that any corporation would be stripped of Constitutional rights, including, say, media conglomerates (are you paying attention, CNN?), he goes on to say,

Now this would have two effects. First, any media organization that wants to be free would thus have to give up the benefits of the corporate form, and will have to organized as a partnership. This will make it much harder for those media organizations to raise operating capital, dealing with changes in ownership as partners die or leave, and the like.

Prof. Volohk's coblogger, Ilya Somin, Associate Professor at George Mason University School of Law, explains the tyrannical nature of the PRA thus:

Thus, the PRA would deny all constitutional rights to all entities organized as corporations. If the Amendment passes, government would be free to search corporate-owned premises at will, restrict freedom of religion at houses of worship owned by corporate entities (which includes most churches), condemn corporate-owned property for private uses and without paying compensation, and so on.

Understand what this means!

The effects of the PRA, if ratified, are almost too innumerable to imagine. But here are three examples.

1. Incorporated churches would have no right of redress or access to the courts if their property is claimed by local, state or federal government under eminent domain. In fact, churches' real property could be seized by governments with no notice or reason given and with no payment made. Why? Because the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution states that

No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

But an incorporated church (and any incorporated business, no matter how small) will not be a "person" under the terms of the PRA, and therefore shall not be entitled to any of these rights or protections.

2. Incorporated entities of churches, such as the United Methodist Printing House, could find themselves with no First Amendment rights of freedom of the press. Here is why:

a. The First Amendment states in part, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; ..."

b. However, Section 2 of the PRA excludes the UM Publishing House as being included in the definition of "the people."

c. Section 3 of the PRA specifies exactly that "Nothing contained herein shall be construed to limit the people's rights of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, ..." but the PRA has already defined the UM Publishing House outside the boundaries of "the people."

3. The First Amendment also protects, "the right of the people peaceably to assemble," but the PRA would utterly separate this right of church members from the church itself because an incorporated church has no rights. Governments from local level to federal could padlock a church's property (or simply seize it entirely). Note that the PRA's Section 3 does not reinforce freedom of assembly, only "freedom of association." While assembly is definitionally personal presence with one another, "association" has no such meaning. We would have only the "right" to call ourselves United Methodists, but not the right personally to assemble together on any property owned by our incorporated church.

A word to skeptics

I would say to readers who are skeptical of the conclusions that Professors Volokh and Somin draw, or of the implications I identify, please just consider the record of the federal government over the past half-century (or more) and ask yourself exactly why you are skeptical:

Self restraint on the part of government officials or bureaucrats?  Based on what empirical or historical evidence do you think that future governments will be more restrained than those of the last several decades?

Good will on the part of government agencies? Again, based on what historical record and what reasons?

Try to think of a single time when government, having been granted (or having seized) the power to exercise more control or regulation of citizens' lives has failed to use that authority beyond what was ever envisioned -- regardless of which party has controlled the Congress or the White House at the time. We would do well to heed George Washington's warning, "Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."

Next steps

I am presently working to draft a resolution to be presented to the annual conference of the Tennessee Conference in June that, if adopted by the annual conference, will put the annual conference on record as opposing ratification of the People's Rights Amendment and urging Tennessee's two senators and the US Representatives of the Tennessee Conference are to vote against it if/when the time comes.

Presently, I am seeking co-sponsors of this resolution which I will post on this site when I have finished it. I also will seek sponsorship of the resolution by the Tennessee Conference's General Commission on Church and Society.

Please feel free to distribute this post using the social-media button immediately below. You may also leave a comment below.

Do human beings really have free will?

Do human beings really have free will - the ability to make genuinely unforced choices? We believe we do. Our entire legal system, in fact, is predicated on willful obedience (or not) to the law or to freely entering into binding contracts. A neuroscientist says that the question, "Do human beings have free will?" is actually a meaningless one because,

Given a materialist view of the universe, it makes no sense to talk about consciousness or experience at all.  We have absolutely no idea what it is about the three pounds of mush between our ears that allows it to perform this trick of being conscious.

In fact, he concludes, it does not matter the slightest whether we really have free will because (1) we cannot ever know that to begin with and (2) whether the answer is yes or no nothing about human behavior will change, anyway.

There seems to be a common thread among materialists: they do not seem to understand that their entire world view sits atop nothing but fog. I am currently reading God and Stephen Hawking, by John Lennox, Oxford mathematician, who coincidentally states on the page I am at, "… it is only belief in a Creator that gives us a satisfactory ground for believing in the uniformity of nature (the inductive principle) in the first place!"

Neuroscientist Lieberman's piece is refreshing though because he understands that even if materialism is true, there is no way for us to know. The problem is that he does not take the obvious and unavoidable next steps: that if materialism is true then there is no way for us to know anything at all. We may as well assume we are living in a Matrix world.

This is just a scientific-sounding version of solipsism and if you think about it (heh!) is just a gussied up variety of Hinduism's teaching of maya, that nothing is real but illusion itself. And yet if, as Lieberman says, the answer won’t affect the way we act – nor even what we think we know – then the smart move is to do what Robert Heinlein advised: even if the deck is crooked, cut the cards. So we’d better live as if free will is real because betting that it is not has potentially devastating, eternal consequences.

Free Will: Weighing Truth and Experience | Psychology Today
Hat tip: Wintery Knight

North Korea: What do you do when your god dies?

That's "god," not "God:"



Found at Video: The weeping North Koreans

Don’t just sample the clip for 10 seconds. Watch to the end and drink in the full spectacle of grown men, prostrate, screaming in grief at the death of their subjugator. I take it state media beamed this out to show the world how unlikely a North Korean Spring is; it might be their first honest moment. Count me in with Michael Totten and Dan Foster in thinking these histrionics are more genuine than we’d like to believe. After all, lesser cult leaders like Jim Jones and Marshall Applewhite have asked and gotten more from their followers than this; surely a few tears were in order in Pyongyang upon learning that God is dead. The whole point of totalitarian conditioning is to draw this reaction without needing soldiers to stand just out of frame pointing rifles at the crowd. Go figure that it actually works on some people.

You cannot reason someone out of something that they were never reasoned into.

The god is dead. Long live the new god!

Totalitarianism must evolve into a religion to survive. The cultic center of the religion must be the dictator. In Lenin's Russia, the religion was communism. Lenin and the party changed it to Marxism-Leninism, but Lenin did not live long enough to become a true cultic center.

Lenin's successor, Stalin, did, with all Stalinism's attendant horrors. After Stalin died in 1953, the Party determined that no general secretary would become a cultic figure again. Instead, they substituted a theology of an Ideal Time and a reformed humanity, the goal being formally announced in 1964 by GenSec Leonid Brezhnev as the attainment of True Communism.

Marxism is an eschatological ideology (a godless religion in its own right, really). The ideal time is when "the workers control the means of production" after the capitalists have been violently overthrown. Lee Harris explained the basic tenets of Marxism, and its fundamental flaws, in his excellent essay, "The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing." Suffice it to say here that Marx considered revolution by the oppressed both essential and inevitable for true socialism to be established. This was a political version of Judgment Day, when the wicked capitalists would be judged and destroyed so that the pure in heart (the heavily romanticized working classes) could attain the Ideal Time.

This appealing but basically foolish ideology held power in the USSR for 70 years, abandoned long before its end by almost all the working classes themselves and most of the ruling class. Soviet communism became a shell game in which commissars and higher ranks lived large and the masses merely lived. Its Ideal Time, however, was hammered home by the propagandists as just around the corner. True Communism was always coming soon, a state in which material production was so great that all human needs were met without shortage. Greed would therefore disappear and the inherent but capitalist-suppressed natural nobility of men and women would emerge. They would be transformed into true communists - altruists who worked each day for the good of the people, not for crass, selfish profit.

That year, 1964, really marked the beginning of the long decline of Soviet communism because non-cultic True Communism required an exhaustively worked and intellectually rigorous theology founded on rationalistic, not cultic, bases. That eliminated Stalinism once for all and Brezhnevism never got started. But without a cultic figure the center would not hold. Brezhnev ruled from 1964 until his death in 1982. After his death, the USSR went through general secretaries like a kid eating candy until it dissolved in 1990-1991. Brezhnev's 18-year tenure is what made the USSR last as long as it did after Stalin's death.

The Party's problem with trying to remake the empire on a non-cultic, intellectual religion was that the state had to devote great efforts and resources into reasoning and educating its people into the religion, beginning the arduous process in pre-school and never ceasing it.

Cultic tyranny's major efforts are domestic, to maintain the regime and its supporting apparatus. Foreign and military endeavors by cultic dictators tend to do poorly because the apparatchiks are selected and elevated based on their loyalty to the leader, not their basic competence in their duties. So: for Stalin, the Great Patriotic War; for Saddam Hussein the Iran War, the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War - all bungled jobs by their cultic leaders.

It was not until the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ejected cultism from its ideology that the USSR became genuinely dangerous to the West. Brezhnev was never a cult figure, instead he was the leader of a triumphant, missionary religion. True Communism brought the USSR into nuclear-military-superpower status. It was under the banner of True communism that the USSR sponsored "wars of national liberation" in Asia and Africa and sought to subvert the governments of Europe and many others. Soviet-sponsored terrorist cells flourished in western Europe, such as the Rote Armee Faction in West Germany. Blessedly for the West and the world, Brezhnev was not succeeded by young, vigorous true believers but by aged Party-climbing apparatchiks who each had not long to live, until Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary. Gorbachev, however, was no true believer and True Communism had no thrall over him. Even before the Berlin Wall was hammered down, he and almost the whole regime were mightily glad to be quit of it.

Intellectually and religiously both, True Communism simply sputtered out, having been built on foundations of sand to begin with. Having exhausted itself into reasoning the people into True Communism, the state never recognized that people who are reasoned into something can be reasoned out (or reason themselves out), and there were more than enough smart Russians to figure out the flaws and inherent, fatal contradictions of the whole, phony system. (The coerced member states of the USSR pretty much never bought into this Russian religion in the first place.)

And so the whole intellectual, rationlistic-but-fragile edifice of True Communism could be brought crashing to ruin by, for example, asking the very simple question, "Who will carry the sewage under communism?"

"Take Kiev, for instance, and see how much of its one and a half million inhabitants arranges his own sewerage system, in his free time, and cleans it and maintains it in good order.

"Who, under communism, will bury the corpses? Will it be self-service or will amateurs carry out the work in their spare time? There is plenty of dirty work in a society and not everyone is a general or a diplomat. Who will carve up the pig carcasses? And who will sweep the streets and cart off the rubbish? . . . Will there be any waiters under communism? . . .

"And finally, for someone who at present has not the slightest idea about how to set about sewage-cleaning, like Comrade Yakubovskiy himself for instance, has he any personal interest at all in the arrival of that day, when he will have to clean up his own crap all by himself? . . .

"What, exactly, does an ordinary, run-of-the-mill Secretary of the District Party Committee stand to gain from this communism? Eh? Plenty of caviar? But he’s got so much caviar already that he can even eat it through his [rear end] if he wishes. A car? But he has two personal Volga cars and a private one as well. Medical care? Food, women, a country house? But he already has all these things. So our dear Secretary of the most Godforsaken District Party Committee stands to gain bugger-all from communism!"

North Korea decades ago ceased to be communist in any sense of the word. Kim Il Sung's objective was never communism, it was dictatorship, a goal he achieved brilliantly. Since then the overriding imperative of the regime has been simply stated and easily enforced: maintain the status quo for the regime no matter the cost in lives and treasure to the rest of the country.

What will change with the apparent succession to the throne of his grandson, Kim Jong Un? Let us hope nothing will. The country is making plenty of trouble in the world now. May its cultic religion remain, for if North Korea's dictator(s) ever get converted to a theology of True Communism, there will really be trouble, indeed.

What not to say to the grieving

Having corresponded with James Joyner over the years, it was a blow to visit his site early this morning to read that his wife, Kimberly, died suddenly last night from unknown causes. Presumably, the cause will be determined, but now James and his two small daughters are in shock.

I have had a lot of experience with funerals and people in mourning, both as one whose kin have died and in ministering to the bereaved. Here is a short course in what to say to the next of kin of the deceased.

What not to say
Do not attempt to explain the death. Comments such as, "This is all part of God's plan," or "There is some purpose served here that we don't understand" are not helpful. Just skip them. Grieving parents, widows or widowers are not looking for cosmic wisdom or theology. No matter how helpful you think such things are, or how intensely you believe them, they do not help and can be very hurtful.

Do not minimize the impact of the death. Deaths of loved ones are consequential, and must be regarded as such. A woman I knew had to bury her three-day-old baby girl. A woman of her church told her, "At least it wasn't a boy." In the recent death of my elderly and long-term ill mother-in-law, several people said to my wife and me, "At least she isn't suffering anymore." I have heard family members say that, but others should not. That's their call, not yours. These kinds of comments are not helpful.

Do not talk about the unfairness of life or make the deceased and the family a victim of circumstances. Comments such as, "I don't see why the doctors could not have done more," or "Your wife was such a good woman, I don't see why she had to die" or the like harm rather than help. The deaths of loved ones create chaos in the mental and emotional states of the families. Often, they wonder whether they could have done something more to save the deceased. Don't say anything that could reinforce these feelings.

What to say
Express sympathy and offer support. Be a friend. Be brief and sincere. Here is a template you can use either verbally or in writing a sympathy card:

I am saddened to hear of your loss. Please be assured that my prayers are with you. I know these days are difficult for you. You have many friends who will support you and who are eager to give you aid and comfort. We pray that you will be strengthened through God's grace, and come to find rest and peace. Sincerely, [name].

It is not inappropriate to offer, "If there is anything we can do, let us know," but not many next of kin will let you know. If you truly want to offer more than moral support, just do it. Offer to take their car to be washed before the funeral. Offer to do their laundry or house sit or visit to answer the phone. Be imaginative in discerning what routine tasks you can perform for the bereaved; those are the tasks that tend to be left undone. Never force yourself on the bereaved, of course, but usually a doer is gratefully welcomed while a mere promiser is forgotten.

If the death was tragic (that is, premature, suicidal or violent) then you should understand that support will be needed for many weeks, not just a few days. The level of support required will decrease, but do not expect that after only a week or so the bereavement will just end and the bereaved will get on with life. "Getting over it" is something that may never happen for the families of those who died tragically. Parents who lose children, for example, never get over it emotionally although after a time their routines may appear normal. But they always grieve, even after decades.

Anniversary dates can be particularly difficult. For those who lose spouses, the next Valentine's Day can be very difficult. A card or bouquet on that day will be very helpful. A phone call on wedding anniversaries or birthdays of the deceased will be much appreciated.

Sex, marriage and exchange of value

One of the classic definitions of economics is that it is the study of the exchange of value. The exchange does not have to be an exchange of money. Things other than money, such as time or labor, are also of value.

Usually, we think of dating, courtship and marriage as matters of the heart, of love, and not very much in economic terms. But this is an aberration in history. Throughout most of humanity's time upon the earth, mating or marriage was seen primarily in economic terms and for billions of people today is still seen that way. The basic foundation of arranged marriages is that marriages are much too important in their broader effect upon the community (usually a tribe or clan) to be left up to the whims of the heart.

Even our own wedding vows - at least those still used by most churches and civil magistrates - reflect a economic-contractual origin, mainly from European feudalism. After all, "I name, take you, name, to have to to hold from this day forward," is legal language derived from taking possession of property. When this formula was established for weddings, the bride pretty much was property of her father, then of her husband. Hence, the minister's traditional question, "Who gives this woman to be married to this man?"

(This question, btw, is excluded from the United Methodist Church's modern vows. Yet every wedding I have officiated, the bride, no matter how financially independent or modern, wants dad to hand her over. I phrase it this way: " Who presents this woman to be married to this man?" I explain early in our meetings that I simply will not ask, "Who gives... ." The brides have always been fine with it, but one time at a rehearsal the bride's uncle (her father was deceased) became so upset at the substitution that I thought he was going to swing at me. But calmer heads prevailed.)

It's somewhat trite nowadays to bemoan the sorry state of the institution of marriage in America and Europe. I bemoan it, too. But unless we understand the economics of sex and marriage - that is, the exchange of value that is transacted in the acts or institutions - then we won't understand the status quo and what to do about it.

And, as the old joke goes, "status quo" is Latin for "the mess we're in." So how did we get to be in the mess we're in?

Trend one: Women's employment

In 1918, a huge pop music hit was, "How 'Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm? (After They've Seen Paree)," wondering whether the boys over there in France would very willingly return to their prewar occupations, such as farming:

How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm
After they've seen Paree'
How ya gonna keep 'em away from Broadway
Jazzin around and paintin' the town
How ya gonna keep 'em away from harm, that's a mystery
They'll never want to see a rake or plow
And who the deuce can parleyvous a cow?
How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm
After they've seen Paree'

Fast forward only one generation and you would ask the same question about Rosie the Riveter. 

How ya gonna keep her back in the home
after she's built a tank?
How ya gonna keep her away from bizness
earning an income and making those deals?
She'll never want to see a broom or a stove
and who the deuce can build a bomber at home?
How ya gonna keep her back in the home
after she's built a tank?

The inflow of women into careers and jobs heretofore held by men was enormous during World War II. Not only were women riveters on defense production lines, they were welders, assemblers, test and transport pilots, sheet-metal workers, tool and die makers, you name it. Large numbers joined the armed forces and were assigned "as weather observers and forecasters, cryptographers, radio operators and repairmen, sheet metal workers, parachute riggers, link trainer instructors, bombsight maintenance specialists, aerial photograph analysts, and control tower operators. By January 1945 only 50 percent of AAF [Army Air Forces] WACs [Women’s Army Corps] held traditional assignments such as file clerk, typist, and stenographer.” 

With the end of the war, civilian distaff employment and military service decreased dramatically but not to their prewar levels. By 1950, paid employment of women was increasing again and in that year one-third of adult women had paying jobs. By 1956 the number had ticked up to 35 percent, including a quarter of all married women. By `1959 the overall rate had risen from one in three (1950) to two of five. The pace slowed after that and rose only to three of five by 1998. At the peak of women's employment outside the home in 2000, 77 percent of women between 25-64 were employed, but then the percentage dropped.

"Women's lib" began long before most people think. Today more than one-fourth of non-farm business are owned by women. 

Trend two: effective, cheap birth control

I covered the effects of the Pill on marriage in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2004 so I won't belabor it at length here. Key excerpt:

Since the invention of the Pill some 40 years ago, human beings have for the first time been able to control reproduction with a very high degree of assurance. That led to what our grandparents would have called rampant promiscuity. The causal relationships between sex, pregnancy and marriage were severed in a fundamental way. The impulse toward premarital chastity for women was always the fear of bearing a child alone. The Pill removed this fear. Along with it went the need of men to commit themselves exclusively to one woman in order to enjoy sexual relations at all. Over the past four decades, women have trained men that marriage is no longer necessary for sex. But women have also sadly discovered that they can't reliably gain men's sexual and emotional commitment to them by giving them sex before marriage.

Nationwide, the marriage rate has plunged 43% since 1960. Instead of getting married, men and women are just living together, cohabitation having increased tenfold in the same period. According to a University of Chicago study, cohabitation has become the norm. More than half the men and women who do get married have already lived together.

Remember, that was seven years ago and trends have moved on. Now we are in the age of "Cheap dates - How the ‘price’ of sex has dropped to record lows." 

Women are jumping into the sack faster and with fewer expectations about long-term commitments than ever, effectively discounting the “price” of sex to a record low, according to social psychologists.

More than 25% of young women report giving it up within the first week of dating. While researchers don’t have a baseline to compare it to, interviews they have conducted lead them to believe this is higher than before, which increases the pressure on other women and changes the expectations of men. ...

Sex is so cheap that researchers found a full 30% of young men’s sexual relationships involve no romance at all -- no wooing, dating, goofy text messaging. Nothing. Just sex.

Men want sex more than women do. It’s a fact that sounds sexist and outdated. But it is a fact all the same -- one that women used for centuries to keep the price of sex high (if you liked it back in the day, you really had to put a ring on it). With gender equality, the Pill and the advent of Internet porn, women’s control of the meet market has been butchered.

As a result, says Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, men are “quicker to have sex in our relationships these days, slower to commitment and just plain pickier.”

This is not an improvement. Despite almost 50 years of social engineering to try to find a manless substitute for marriage, nothing better than traditional marriage has been found to propagate the next generation, which is, after all, what keeps homo sapiens a going concern. Obviously, unwed women can bear children as we know all too well, but those children are at a marked disadvantage compared to kids raised in households living with both natural parents, disadvantage not only financially but socially. 

But with easy availability to sex, men have less and less incentive to marry. Saint Paul advised young men that "it is better to marry than to burn" with lust, but today young men don't have to do either. See also, "Why Are Women More Promiscuous Than Ever?" that asks the truly stupid question, "And why are men taking advantage of it by withholding commitment? " Because, to be deliberately pedantic, "you don't need to buy a cow when milk is cheap." Hence,

It’s little wonder that the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds who are married has shrunk by an average of 1% each year this past decade -- down to 46% now. Single women have been catching on, but those who don’t discount sex say they can’t seem to get anyone to “pay” their higher price.

Meaning that women whose position is that he don't get the thing if she don't get the ring find that the market is wide open for him to look elsewhere. Only if enormous numbers of women decided alike to charge a higher price for their favors could this trend be reversed. But what are the odds?

“Let’s be realistic: It’s not going to happen here,” Regnerus says. “Women don’t really need men and marriage -- economically, socially, and culturally -- like they once did. What I hear in interviews with women is plenty of complaining about men or about the dating scene, but their annoyance is seldom directed at other women.”

Trend three: "The perils of no-fault divorce"

In states with no-fault divorce (including New York) the marital contract is severed on the unilateral demand of one spouse -- often the wrongdoer, with whom matrimonial judges consistently side. Victory in family court frequently coincides, too, with effective use of “preemptive strikes” -- legal motions and maneuvers that empower the “prepared” side (i.e., the one who launched the divorce), and especially the one with more cash on hand.

And eyes roll at any mention of misdeeds like adultery. It’s the 21st century, folks!

Because most judges face a huge volume of cases, litigants get herded in and out as quickly as possible. Dissents and other attempts to hold up the process get slapped down: This is a divorce factory, not an effort to produce justice.

Once upon a time, society in general valued the integrity of the marriage contract so highly that divorce was granted only for exceptional reasons. No fault divorce changed that and now either the husband or the wife can file to dissolve the marriage for any reason s/he wants. All fifty states and D.C. have no-fault divorce laws on the books. At least 70 percent of divorces are initiated by the wife and up to 90 percent of custody awards go to the woman (link).

A deleterious result is that men are increasingly reluctant (or able) to marry at all. Recent data on decreasing marriage rates of men are skewed by effects of the Great recession that began in 2008 and continued higher jobless rates of men than women. However, just from 2008-2009, the rate dropped significantly, continuing a trend of a few decades.

Trend four: increasing rates of cohabitation

My anecdotal observation is that since entering full-time clergy appointment in 1997, 90 percent of the couples who have asked me to officiate their wedding were already living together. I actually think, but don't know, that the other 10 percent were, too, but I know that 90 percent were. They were of all ages, including a couple in their fifties.

Repeated studies show that the cohabitation rate has risen sharply since 1960. This bodes ill for their marriage.

Many studies have found that those who live together before marriage have a considerably higher chance of eventually divorcing. The reasons for this are not well understood. In part, the type of people who are willing to cohabit may also be those who are more willing to divorce. There is some evidence that the act of cohabitation itself generates attitudes in people that are more conducive to divorce, for example the attitude that relationships are temporary and easily can be ended.

If either of the partners has a child when they move in together (almost always it is the woman, hardly ever the man) then the risk to the child is raised well above the risk a child has when living with both actual parants who are married. This risk is higher even if the couple shacking up are both the parents of the child. 

Wintery Knight asks, " Is cohabitation a bigger problem for society than divorce?" 

A new report says cohabitation has replaced divorce as the biggest source of instability for American families. ...

It certainly is the case that cohabiting couples who have children tend to be less educated, poorer, and less committed to their relationship than couples who have children in marriage.

So one reason that children are less likely to thrive in cohabiting families than in intact, married families is that their parents, or the adults in their lives, have fewer of the resources that they need to be good parents.

But the best research on cohabitation and child well-being controls for factors like income, education, and race/ethnicity. And even after you control for these factors, you still find that children in cohabiting families are significantly more likely to suffer from depression, delinquency, drug use, and the like.

For instance, one study from the University of Texas at Austin found that teens living in a cohabiting stepfamily were more than twice as likely to use drugs, compared to teens living in an intact married family–even after controlling for differences in income, education, race, and family instability.

Read the whole thing.

Typically, discovering that the market rate for sex is practically zero and that men are thus less inclined to marry (for other reasons, too), a woman often concludes that since sex won't make a man commit to her (since he can get it else-whom easily), maybe living with her will. Once he discovers how desirable she is in other ways, she thinks he'll decide to tie the knot. Sometimes, yes, but if cohabiting couples do get married, the woman typically marries the third man she has lived with and the man the second woman. A woman usually thinks that cohabiting will lead to marriage, but the man thinks that cohabiting substitutes for marriage.

Anyway, soon the typical cohabiting woman discovers the downside: Men who shack up with women are bums, literally -- "A new study reveals that a man is more likely to live with a woman outside marriage if he is financially unstable." Well, duh.

Trend five: the rise of the woman professional and the impossible-standard fantasy

Women are as a group becoming better educated than men. This alone makes it tough for marriage because women are generally hypergamous, meaning they almost never agree to "marry down," while men have never had a problem with it. When a successful, financially well-off woman professional surveys bachelor availability, there are diminishing numbers of single men who are of equal or greater status. 

And increasing number of women are choosing careers over marriage themselves. It is not just men who are delaying or avoiding marriage. More and more women are, too, since they can have sex without fear of pregnancy (except for, "oops") and altogether need men less and less for financial support. Increasingly, women are deciding in their college years that they can delay marriage until their advanced degrees are completed and their careers established, meaning that many of them deliberately decide to wait until their thirties to marry.

Which is not to say that their decision will come true. When a professional woman reaches her thirties, who does she think will be waiting for her? By then pretty much all the single men left will be (a) never married and not much inclined to it, (b) divorced, which has its own attendant risks since second marriages fail at a much higher rate than first marriages, or (c), well, gay. Good luck with that. Even a minimally hypergamous woman will find very slim pickings, indeed.

The Time cover story of Aug. 21, 2000 (no link), reported,

Danielle Crittenden, author of What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us, argues that women have set themselves up for disappointment, many putting off marriage until their 30s only to find themselves unskilled in the art of compatibility and surrounded by male peers looking over their Chardonnays at women in their 20s. "Modern people approach marriage like it's a Bosnia-Serbia negotiation. Marriage is no longer as attractive to men," she says. "No one's telling college girls it's easier to have kids in your 20s than in your 30s."

Michael Broder, a Philadelphia psychotherapist and author of The Art of Living Single, decries what he calls the "perfect-person problem," in which women refuse to engage unless they're immediately taken with a man, failing to give a relationship a chance to develop. "Few women can't tell you about someone they turned down, and I'm not talking about some grotesque monster," he says. "But there's the idea that there has to be this great degree of passion to get involved, which isn't always functional. So you have people saying things like, 'If I can't have my soul mate, I'd rather be alone.' And after that, I say, 'Well, you got your second choice."

Conclusion

I am just describing, not prescribing, for I don't have a prescription that is realistically possible in our culture. Women simply do not need a man's financial support as much as they used to. At the same time, a woman's sexual inducement for a man to take vows is practically shredded by other women lowering the "price" of sex to almost nil. And the widening belief among men (justified or not) is that most marriages are doomed to begin with and will end in divorce, and that lessens their willingness to marry, too.

This is not going to be turned around. It is the new reality and the new "normal." But there is nothing normal about it.