EWTN News (May 19, 2026) reports that a Heritage Foundation study attributes declining U.S. marriage rates primarily to cultural shifts regarding sex, unwed childbearing, and heightened material expectations rather than economic factors, with researcher Rachel Sheffield emphasizing that “the data tell a different story” from economic explanations. The report frames marriage decline as a policy problem solvable through government-funded marriage education programs and media reorientation. While the article accurately identifies observable symptoms of civilizational decay, it operates entirely within a naturalistic framework that ignores the supernatural causes and the only true remedy — the restoration of Christ the King’s reign over society and the sacramental order of the Catholic Church.
The Symptom Is Real but the Diagnosis Is Crippled
The statistics presented are grim and, in their own terms, largely accurate. The collapse from over 90% of Americans married by ages 30–35 in 1962 to 55% as of 2025 represents nothing less than the disintegration of the natural family as the foundational unit of civil society. This is not a minor sociological trend; it is a civilization-wide catastrophe. The Heritage Foundation’s Rachel Sheffield is correct to note that “cultural shifts” rather than wages are the primary driver, and her observation that “people at all education and income levels have embraced the cultural push to disconnect marriage and sex” names a real phenomenon. The college-educated class, which “most likely promote the cultural messages that marriage is unnecessary, outdated, and even oppressive,” while practicing marriage privately among themselves, represents a particularly vicious form of hypocrisy that poisons the working class while preserving its own social capital.
Yet the entire analysis suffers from a fatal myopia: it treats marriage as a merely natural institution amenable to policy engineering, government programs, and media messaging. There is not a single word in this report — nor, one suspects, in the Heritage Foundation’s research apparatus — about the sacramental nature of matrimony, about grace, about the indissolubility of the marriage bond as defined by Our Lord Jesus Christ, or about the Church’s exclusive competence over Christian marriage. The report discusses “marriage education programs” and “discounts on marriage licenses” with the same technocratic enthusiasm one might apply to highway infrastructure. This is the hallmark of naturalistic liberalism dressed in conservative clothing — it can count the corpses but cannot name the killer.
The Sixties Did Not Happen in a Vacuum
The report’s timeline is telling. The marriage collapse begins its steepest descent in the 1960s — precisely the same decade that the conciliar revolution was unleashed upon the Catholic Church by John XXIII and his successors. The Heritage Foundation, like virtually all “conservative” American think tanks, operates in complete ignorance of — or deliberate silence about — the causal relationship between the destruction of Catholic doctrine and the destruction of the natural family.
When Pope Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), condemned the proposition that “the Church has not the power of establishing diriment impediments of marriage” (error 68) and that “matrimonial causes and espousals belong by their nature to civil tribunals” (error 74), he was defending not merely an ecclesiastical prerogative but the very divine constitution of the family. When the Council of Trent anathematized those who deny the Church’s right to establish diriment impediments, it was affirming that marriage is not a human contract subject to civil engineering but a sacrament instituted by Christ, governed by divine law, and entrusted to the custody of His Church.
The conciliar sect, through its systematic demolition of Catholic moral teaching — the embrace of religious liberty (Dignitatis Humanae), the practical abandonment of the indissolubility of marriage through the “annulment factory,” and the silent acquiescence to the sexual revolution — bears an enormous share of responsibility for the very collapse the Heritage Foundation laments. As Our Lord declared: “A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can an evil tree bring forth good fruit” (Matt. 7:18). The evil fruit of family destruction grew from the evil tree of Modernism, which St. Pius X identified as the “synthesis of all heresies” in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907) and which was condemned in the 65 propositions of Lamentabili sane exitu — the same year the Holy Office identified the corruption of doctrine as the root of all social evils.
Policy Band-Aids on a Hemorrhaging Wound
The Heritage Foundation’s proposed solutions are revealing in their inadequacy. Sheffield calls for funds from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program to be redirected toward “strengthening marriages” through high school marriage education programs and premarital preparation courses. She highlights Utah’s “Healthy Marriage Initiative” as a model, where couples receive discounts on marriage licenses for completing premarital education.
Let us be blunt: government-funded marriage education is a substitute for the Church’s mission, not a supplement to it. The state has no competence whatsoever in forming consciences for the sacrament of matrimony. As Pope Leo XIII taught in Arcanum Divinae Sapientiae (1880), the Church alone has the authority to legislate on marriage, and any attempt by the civil power to claim jurisdiction over matrimonial matters is an act of usurpation. The Heritage Foundation’s proposals, however well-intentioned, treat the federal government as a legitimate agent of moral formation — a proposition that Pius XI explicitly rejected in Quas Primas (1925), where he insisted that Christ the King, not the state, must govern all aspects of social life.
Moreover, the call for “a reorientation of cultural messages in the media, TV shows, and advertisements” to promote marriage is precisely the kind of naturalistic humanism that the pre-conciliar Magisterium condemned. The media of bourgeois, secular America — the same media that glorifies fornication, contraception, and homosexual “marriage” — will not be reformed by inserting pro-marriage advertisements between sitcoms. As St. Pius X warned, the modern world’s errors flow from the rejection of supernatural truth, and no amount of messaging can compensate for the absence of grace.
The Economic Dimension Cannot Be Dismissed Entirely
While Sheffield is correct that the purely economic argument is insufficient — wages have not declined consistently over the entire period of marriage decline — her dismissal of economic factors is itself too hasty. The report acknowledges that “inflation-adjusted earnings did decline among working-class and lower-income men during the 1970s and 1980s,” which coincides precisely with the period when the sexual revolution and the contraceptive culture were destroying the economic rationale for marriage among the working class. The disconnect between sex and procreation, enabled by the contraceptive mentality that the conciliar sect failed to condemn (and in many practical ways embraced), is simultaneously a cultural and an economic revolution. When sex is available without commitment, and when children can be prevented or aborted, the economic incentives for marriage are structurally undermined.
This is not merely a “cultural shift” in the abstract; it is the logical consequence of the rejection of Catholic moral teaching on marriage, sexuality, and the family. The Heritage Foundation cannot see this because it refuses to acknowledge that Catholic teaching is the only true foundation for the social order.
What the Report Dares Not Say
The most damning omission in this report is its complete silence about the supernatural dimension of marriage. There is no mention of sacramental grace, of the indissolubility of the marriage bond, of the primary end of marriage as the procreation and education of children, or of the Church’s divine mandate to govern matrimonial matters. The report treats marriage as a social contract whose stability depends on cultural messaging and economic conditions — a view that Pope Pius XI would have recognized as the very error he spent his pontificate combating.
In Quas Primas, Pius XI declared: “His reign, namely, extends not only to Catholic nations or to those who, by receiving baptism according to law, belong to the Church, even though their erroneous opinions have led them away or discord has separated them from love, but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.” The collapse of marriage in America is not merely a sociological problem; it is a consequence of the public rejection of Christ the King’s authority over the family, over sexuality, and over the social order. No marriage education program, no media campaign, and no government policy can remedy this. Only the integral reign of Christ — through His Church, through the sacraments, and through the submission of civil society to divine law — can restore the family to its proper order.
The Heritage Foundation report, for all its empirical competence, is ultimately a document of bourgeois conservatism that wants the fruits of Christian civilization without its roots. It wants stable families without the Church, moral order without the sacraments, and social cohesion without the Kingship of Christ. This is impossible. As Our Lord warned: “Without Me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).
Source:
Cultural shifts drive decline in U.S. marriage rates, Heritage report says (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 19.05.2026