Results of a Rutgers University study are sobering and disconcerting-the majority of today's young adults are inclined toward living together outside of marriage.
by Cecil E. Maranville
There was an outside chance 30 years
ago that a 6-year-old child might know a child from a home broken by divorce.
Today there is an outside chance that a 6-year-old child might know a
child from a home not broken by divorce. The oddity is becoming the child
from the home of his married biological parents.
Hyperbole? Maybe. Maybe not. A phenomenal
change has quietly swept through Western society, and few seem to know
about it. Fewer still seem to care. Over the course of the last few
decades, societal norms have evolved from viewing divorce as a stigma
to seeing it as normal, natural and often necessary. Sociologists summarize
this radical change by referring to "the divorce revolution." The children
of the divorce revolution are not buying the cavalier philosophy about
divorce being normal. And they are taking steps that will-they think-help
them to avoid the pain and costs associated with broken marriages.
The divorce revolution has spawned "the cohabitation generation."
"By simple definition, living together-or
unmarried cohabitation-is the status of couples who are sexual partners,
not married to each other, and sharing a household" ("Should We Live
Together?" A Comprehensive Review of Recent Research by David Popenoe
and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, The National Marriage Project: the Next
Generation Series. Emphasis added throughout).
The biblical term for unmarried cohabitation
is "fornication." God reveals that sexual relations outside of marriage
are damaging. "Flee sexual immorality. Every sin that a man does is
outside the body, but he who commits sexual immorality sins against
his own body" (1 Corinthians 6:18). Why? What did God know that people
have been discovering the hard way?
