from PART III - SOCIAL AND CULTURAL IMPACT
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY
The secular understanding of sexuality and intimate human relationships changed markedly in the twentieth century, and this impacted heavily on the institutions of marriage and family. The churches’ engagement with these changes was diffuse, divisive and slow. They responded differently to the arrival of reliable contraception and legal abortion, and to the demands both for easy extrication from failed marriages, and for remarriage or ‘further marriage’. The expectation that couples should refrain from sexual intercourse until marriage has been generally abandoned by couples themselves, and is under severe strain even among conservative Christians. Since the average age of first marriage (in England and Wales in 2000) was thirty-one for men and twenty-eight for women it is not difficult to see why. At the end of the twentieth century, over 40 per cent of marriages in those countries were predicted to end in divorce, and 39 per cent of children were born outside of marriage. The figures are similar in Canada and the USA. In some countries married people were already becoming a minority of the adult population.
Contraception
An enlightening window into the mind of Anglicanism over the century regarding marriage and family is the stream of resolutions emanating from successive Lambeth Conferences (of bishops of churches throughout the Anglican communion). It is probably fair to say that most Protestant churches were in sympathy with the resolutions on marriage and family. In 1920 the Lambeth Conference issued ‘an emphatic warning against the use of unnatural means for the avoidance of conception … and against the evils with which the extension of such use threatens the race’.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.