Sometimes it feels as if every day in the calendar marks some sort of cause for celebration or sombre reflection. 

Last Friday marked 75 years since VE Day, the end of World War Two in Europe. A two minute silence and celebrations were held across the UK. The next day, Saturday 9 May was World Migratory Bird Day. Admittedly this was a less prestigious occasion, but presumably it was important to someone, somewhere.

This week, between 11 and 17 May, the UK marks Marriage Week 2020. According to the official website, this year’s event includes “an invitation to reflect on your relationship now, to take stock, to ask where it’s going and what the future might look like whether you’re married or in a relationship”. With all the events that are marked throughout the year – some more frivolous than others – marriage week feels like an event worth celebrating. 

Many tired axioms are used to describe marriage today: ‘the building block of society’, ‘the gold standard of commitment’ and, ‘marriage is an institution’. Tired these axioms may be but they are hardly contrived.

As Christians, we know instinctively that marriage is a good thing. The Bible describes how marriage was instituted by God from the very beginning as the context for sex, children and family life. Genesis 2:24 says: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife”. Theologically, the union of one man and one woman is a picture of Christ and his bride the church.

The binding together of two humans in the presence of God, for life, and excluding all others, is the God-ordained pattern for stable relationships, happy children and a prosperous society. When civilisations forsake marriage and give way to promiscuity, abuse and heartbreak is sure to follow. Marriage is a good gift for all human beings, as part of God’s common grace.

Today, it’s more important than ever to celebrate marriage and point society to its benefits. In April, the BBC reported that the marriage rate south of the border fell to its lowest level on record in 2018, with only 235,000 marriages registered in England and Wales – a drop of 45 per cent (!) since 1972. In Scotland, marriage is also declining. Official figures show that there were 26,546 marriages in 2018, a decrease of 37 per cent since 1972.

Tragically, a high number of couples who do marry end up separating after a few years. According to official statistics, almost half (42 per cent) of marriages end in divorce. Divorce means the separation of spouses and also the tearing of fathers and mothers from their children. The phrase ‘stay together for the kids’, memorialised by pop punk band blink-182 in 2001 barely applies two decades later.

Family breakdown in the UK and other Western nations is at endemic levels and it causes all manner of harm for adults and, especially, children. Young people who are deprived of a parent are shown to have poorer mental health outcomes and in homes where the father has ended a marriage, single mothers are often left fending for themselves, working to put food on the table on a single income whilst supporting their children. Family breakdown feeds the cycle of poverty and lowers the life chances of thousands of kids.

According to UK group the Marriage Foundation, family breakdown also harms the economy to the tune of £51 billion pounds a year. Their website states: “When families split up, resources of time, care and money that were previously focused on one household now have to stretch to two. Almost all couples are worse off after a split and the resulting lone parent and non-resident parent families require disproportionate financial support from the state. For example, using the government’s own numbers, 42 per cent of lone parents receive housing benefit compared to just 6 per cent of couple parents.

“Thus by far the biggest contributor is the financial support that the state provides lone parent families through tax credits, housing benefits and lone parent benefits. Given that some proportion of couple families also claim support, everything above that pro-rata baseline can reasonably be attributed to family breakdown.”

Tackling family breakdown is a daunting task, that requires society as a whole to understand the importance of marriage, long-term commitment and monogamy decades into the ‘sexual revolution’. It will require investment, education and incentives by the state. As the church, our job is hardly less intimidating. As well as teaching the younger generation about marriage and supporting couples as they struggle through the hard seasons of life, we need to convince the governing authorities and society at large that marriage is an institution worth preserving.

At the moment, some politicians seem determined to destroy it altogether. At Westminster, legislation has been tabled to enable ‘no-fault divorce’, removing any requirement to find fault before a marriage can be ended. This proposal would destroy a core principle at the heart of marriage – commitment – and make exiting a union easier than ending a broadband contract. It must be opposed, and we should pray that MPs see the danger of the move before it’s too late and the marriage rate, and family breakdown is compounded.

The task may be daunting but we have one advantage in the fight to save marriage – its abiding value and benefits are easy to see.

At a personal level, we can all point to relatives (perhaps parents or grandparents) who had long, happy marriages and were a blessing to us personally growing up. And we can live out marriage as God intended, bearing with our spouse and loving them through life as an example to the watching world. At a political level, we can demonstrate the harms, social, economic and otherwise, that a dearth of marriage – divorce and family breakdown – do.

Most of all, we can trust that God who is pleased with marriage as a representation of the church and Christ, wants it to be valued, and pray that he would bring glory to himself by establishing it at the heart of UK society again.

Marriage tells a better story. Prayerfully and together, let’s make it a bestseller.