A Preferential Option for the Family

Christianity has had, since its founding, a strong commitment to helping the poor, a commitment that is one of the glories of Christian history. Recently, the Catholic Church has expressed this concern by calling for “a preferential option for the poor.”

Once we rightly assume that our duty is to help the poor, the really important question for Christians becomes: how is one to help? In the United States, over the last 40 years or more, the primary mode of fighting poverty has been through programs of the welfare state. Such programs are now seen as having failed in many and profound ways.

One of these failures has come from the very bureaucracies that have grown up around the administration of welfare. These complex and extremely expensive systems have acted like sponges absorbing much of the money that the poor were supposed to receive. This trickle-down-through-the-bureaucracy method of delivering money has been grossly inefficient. Sometimes as little as 10% of the funds have actually gotten to the designated recipients.

But the “War on Poverty” welfare approach has failed not just because of the bureaucratic sponge, but for another major reason as well. It turns out that giving money to the poor with few strings attached has increased poverty rather than alleviated it. It has, in fact, created a large welfare-dependent class. By giving money to unmarried mothers, the growth of the fatherless, as a class, has been subsidized while families have suffered.

Recent statistics bear this out: For example, fatherless families represent over 54% of poor families—only 6% of married couple families are poor. 99% of the time, homeless families are fatherless families. The poor are over four times as likely to have a broken family as are the non-poor. This destruction of the family, which began among minorities in the urban ghettos, has now spread to the white community in much of the country.

Recently, the fastest growing rate of illegitimacy is among white women, including white professional women. A large white underclass, filled with the children of single-parent families, is forming. And, of course, divorce is a well-documented cause of poverty in all racial groups—that is, children are twice as likely to be living in poverty after a divorce than before.

The basic fact is that marriage makes great economic and social sense. Unmarried young men commonly waste their time, energy and money on consumer goods, drugs, alcohol, etc. Young unmarried women with children go onto welfare just to survive, and because they know it is there. Once there, they perpetuate a welfare society.

There is now good evidence that the best way to get out of poverty is through marriage and a well functioning family. Research has shown that the great majority of people (95% in one study) born in poverty who then rise out of it are, in fact, married. It is the unmarried who remain stuck in poverty. Studies of black poverty and crime have shown that if you control for family structure, black crime rates and poverty rates are not significantly different from those of whites.

Historical evidence supporting this is the fact that in the 1930s, the black population of Harlem was much poorer than it is today, but the crime rate was dramatically lower. The difference was that black family structure was still largely in place at that time. Likewise, it is becoming evident that the lower crime rates and more rapid escape from poverty of Asian immigrants have been largely the result of their strong, intact family systems. In short, in a large proportion of cases, poverty is the result of a failed family structure.

This understanding of the failed family as a source of much of our social pathology—including but not restricted to poverty—has become widely accepted. It is time that the Church also recognized family break-down as the primary source of poverty. If it does so, a new formulation might be “a preferential option for the family.”

Still more recently, it has become clear that the failure of the family has really been due to the failure of the father. Another name for single-parent families is almost always fatherless families. Thus, it is the absence of fathers that defines our family crisis. David Blankenhorn’s book, Fatherless America, has helped to bring this point to the nation’s consciousness.

What all this means is that if we are going to help the poor, we have to help the family, and to help the family we must help the father. We must find ways to bring fathers back into families—and once they are there, we must find ways to keep them there. We must give to fatherhood a renewed cultural legitimacy. Here again, the Church can play a central role. But when was the last time you heard the Bishop’s Council speak on the importance of marriage and of fathers as a solution to our social problems, especially poverty? It is surely time for the Church to lead the way.

Author

  • Paul C. Vitz

    Paul Vitz is a popular author and professor of psychology at New York University.

tagged as:

Join the Conversation

in our Telegram Chat

Or find us on
Item added to cart.
0 items - $0.00

Orthodox. Faithful. Free.

Signup to receive new Crisis articles daily

Email subscribe stack
Share to...