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It's Wednesday, June 10, 2026. I'm Albert Mohler and this is the Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. From time to time, a headline passes and you look at it and you go, okay, I'm gonna bite. I'm gonna bite the apple. I need to look at what this argument is because it's going to be interesting. Sarah Pacweno, writing in column for the USA Today. Here's the headline, Liberals aren't anti marriage. We're just doing it. Okay? So that's really interesting. And by the way, I could just stop with a headline because looking at it, you really do see the modern autonomous self expression culture right before your eyes. In other words, right with the claim liberals aren't anti marriage, we're just doing it our own way. Okay? So here's one of the most basic issues when it comes to understanding marriage. It's not there to do your own way. Marriage is an objective institution. We as Christians believe it's a part of creation, order. God himself, the Creator who made us in his image and made us male and female, made us for marriage. And it was to the married couple that he said, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. Okay? So you look at this and there is a standard for marriage. Marriage is a defined institution. And by the way, throughout most of human history, throughout most of the world, there's been very little confusion about this at all. Now, if you are looking at this even from a secular worldview, you would say, well, evidently that's quite necessary. If you're gonna have the continuation of soc, you're gonna have to have some kind of institution in which a man and a woman come together and then have children and raise them in a way that at the very least is productive for society and the continuation of society. Now, as Christians, we believe in much more than that. But the headline here, when we're told that liberals aren't anti marriage, we're just doing it our own way. Okay? This demands a closer look. So let's just go together. Let's just look at this article. The article begins, quote, sometimes it feels like everyone on my Instagram feed is getting engaged, getting married, or celebrating a wedding anniversary. Personally, the author says, I feel indifferent toward the idea of getting married myself. I find the thought of a life partner compelling, but not necessary. I'm not firmly against it. I can see myself getting married at a courthouse or a Las Vegas chapel. But if that doesn't happen, that's okay. She then says, this nonchalance is infuriating to conservatives. Institute for Family Studies fellows Brad Wilcox and Grant Bailey wrote that over the past 50 years, liberals have, quote, led the cultural change to devalue, deny and discount the institution of marriage, end quote. I think that's exactly what they've done. Not only that, I don't think it's a secret that they've done it. I also think that's what they said they were doing. In other words, moral progressive said marriage is an outdated, oppressive institution. So we're gonna redefine it. We're going to do it our own way. And that's exactly what this headline is all about. Liberals aren't anti marriage. We're just doing it our own way. And she refers to her own position, her own argument, as nonchalant toward marriage. And then she says, Institute for Family Studies fellows Brad Wilcox and Grant Bailey, they charge liberals with being the problem. Now let me just say that when it comes to the subversion of marriage, it's not just a liberal problem, it's not just a leftist progressivist problem, but when it comes to the ideological subversion of marriage, it largely is a liberal progressivist, leftist thing. That's basically where all of this comes from and where all of this leads. She goes on to ask the question, however, quote, if liberals really detest marriage the way we're said to, why do I know so many people getting married? End quote. Well, I can give her the answer. And it is because there is a creation order impulse towards marriage that even the left finds very difficult to deny. It is interesting that the hippies during the 60s, free love, free sex and all the rest, they eventually in the main settled down and got married and lived pretty conventional lives. And that's simply because I think it's so built into creation order that eventually even the people who say, I don't want anything to do with marriage, marriage isn't for me, they eventually succumb. At least the large plurality of them, even the majority of them simply eventually get married. Now if they don't hold to a biblical conception of marriage and they are a part of a society that has liberalized marriage, they can make this just a part of their individual self expression. But the point is they do tend to move in this direction. All right, so there's more to the argument. The article is basically arguing that when you look at what liberals are doing with marriage, they're not rejecting it, they're redefining it. And they're redefining it in terms of their own self expression. They're just doing it their own way. She writes this quote at age 28. She says, I'm at the age where on average women in the United States are entering their first marriages. Very interesting way to put it. First marriage. That tells you something of how the left looks at marriage. Quote. I lived in the south for most of my life, a place where traditional views of partnership prevail. It makes sense that my social media feeds are consumed by smiling couples, diamond rings and white dresses. Okay, but she's getting to a point here. The numbers really are interesting is the way she presents it. Still. There's been a 54% decrease in women's marriage rate since 1900 according to a 2022 study from Bowling Green State University. Just stop there for a moment. Let's just assume these numbers are right. It is highly informative. Let's just say at the very least to know that there's been a 54% decrease in women's marriage rates since 1900. I mean, we're not talking a small number here, we're talking about 54%. And I don't think most people in even just a passing knowledge of statistics fail to understand that 54% means the majority. Okay, so I don't think the numbers hold up if this is over a woman's lifetime. But that becomes another part of the story. She continues. Quote, Kat Tinbarge, a 28 year old journalist living in New Jersey, attributed this decline to the rights women have won over the years after all women only earned financial independence en masse when the Equal Credit Opportunity act became law in 1974, when they no longer needed to have a man co sign their loan. So here's a woman saying, this is something that was made possible by advances in women and overcoming male oppression. And that includes something as specific as the Equal Credit opportunity Act of 1974. And then this woman, the 28 year old journalist named Kat, she goes on and says, quote, the right to have your own bank account, the right to open your own line of credit, the right to own your own home. All these relatively recent rights that women have gained have changed the landscape of marriage so much. Okay, so just buckle your seatbelt for the next paragraph. She has known since childhood that she wanted a wedding and she got engaged to her partner Anna in 2025. Quote she attributes this fascination to the prevalence of weddings and pop culture, from TLCs say yes to the dress to YouTubers vlogging about their wedding days. Quote as much as I wanted to get married, I think that it's Such a phenomenal advancement that young women in particular could de center marriage from their lives. End quote. Okay, we just need to camp here for a moment because when you look at giant moral revolutions in society, they sometimes show up with people saying, wow, that's a moral revolution. Sometimes not so fast. Sometimes they show up. When you have an article like this about marriage and the 28 year old individual the reporter or the columnist in this case goes to is a woman who's very much on the progressive side of the equation. She's very progressivist here, and she's married to a woman, or at least again, the legal fiction of same sex marriage. She wanted a wedding and she said she got this from television. She says that right out loud. And thus she wanted a wedding. And so now she's married, at least in terms of the current law in the United States, to another woman. Now, again, that's the entire world turned upside down. You talk about creation order, and that's where Christians have to go in something like this, our understanding of marriage. And you understand that if you're gonna say male and female created he them, and then you just go down. And all of a sudden, now you had a man and a woman in Genesis chapter one, and in Genesis chapter two, now it's a man and a man, or a woman and a woman, or any permutation thereof, you understand how this is the rejection of creation order, but it's just treated as an issue of lifestyle choice. And thus human beings are defined as people who possess an infinite number of lifestyle choices. And if you decide to use it this way that you're right, you decide to use it in another way that you're right. Kind of gets back to the conversation about libertarianism that we had on the briefing yesterday. But, okay, the article continues. You probably thought it would. And so this columnist says about that other wedding quote, this is a big factor in my own indifference toward marriage. I no longer have to get married to attain the financial goals that I have, nor do I have to be reliant on a partner for financial stability. And so that's her argument, and she makes it right out front. She understands that there's another side. And she says that when there comes to opposition to this, including when it comes to LGBTQ relationships and all the rest. Well, here's what she writes. She says, quote, speaking of some couples that got married and kind of alternative circumstances, quote, I love that both couples did their weddings their way. Okay, so let's just look at it again. This is self expression. You do it Your way, marriage, do it your way. But we're not talking about an ice cream sundae here. We're talking about a creation order institution. All right, she continues, she says, I spoke with other LGBTQ people who were excited to get married, as well as several people who had friends, not priests, officiate their weddings. Of course, I would just figure that out. Quote at the root of it. This is another reason conservatives are complaining. She writes, it's not that Gen Z liberals aren't getting married. It's that our marriages look different from the ones they expect us to have. End quote. Okay, so once again, big insight here. She says that conservatives have their own conservative view of marriage and liberals are freed from that conservative understanding or conception of marriage. Here's where Christians have to say, we don't hold to a conservative understanding of marriage. We hold to an ontological understanding of marriage. We hold to a reality based understanding of marriage. We don't believe that marriage is some product of human evolution. We believe it is a creation order gift of God to human beings, male and female, and for the entire existence of society. We believe in it so strongly that we believe that if marriage isn't honored, the society will fall apart inevitably over time. We understand that having children and taking responsibility for those children as the man and the woman come together and are fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, beginning with filling their home, it just becomes an act of recapitulating the glory of God, showing the glory of God even in the act of creation as successive generations follow in marriage. But we think marriage is a thing. It's not something that we just imagine it's not up for our negotiation. We believe it's a creation order institution. It exists regardless of what we think think about it. Marriage is one thing and one thing only. Now, that's not to say that marriage customs and marriage laws and other things haven't changed over time, but it is true. And here's just something Christians have to keep in mind. We believe, as Jesus said, our Lord himself said, do you not know that it was the Father's intention from the beginning that a man and woman should come together in the covenant of marriage and be faithful in that marriage unto each other. And of course, the background of that was a question about divorce. But we're looking here at the fact that Jesus himself said marriage is a thing. Marriage is a creation order gift. Marriage is. He didn't use the word ontological, but he is the one who made marriage ontological. There's also a very progressivist leftist ideology behind much of this destabilization of marriage. And it shows up in language. So for example, the woman married to a woman according to the law here says in the article, quote, the weddings and the marriages and the relationships have just gotten less traditional compared to the CIS heteropatriarchal version of marriage. End quote. Cis hetero means not gender fluid, heterosexual. And then she adds patriarchal. So this is what she believes liberated humanity is now freed from, freed from that understanding of marriage which is essentially a man and a woman and that is an exclusive traditional relationship. And then this writer comes to conclude quote, I came to understand through my conversations that marriage, like most major decisions, is deeply personal. While my feelings on marriage may still be complicated, there are plenty of liberal people who are ready for their happily ever after. And even then, conservatives are furious about it. End quote. No, conservatives aren't furious about liberals getting married. Conservatives are furious about liberals redefining marriage, subverting marriage, making marriage just an exercise of personal autonomy and personal individual self definition. We're opposed to that. Not because we're just opposed to liberal ideas, but because we believe society itself will unravel if they get their way. Alright, while we're looking at the liberal, the leftist revision of Marriage and the Family and all the rest, I want to point to a new book that's just come out and we'll talk about it more in successive editions of the briefing. The title of the book is For Better and Worse, the Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage. Stephanie Kuntz, who has taught for many decades at Evergreen State College, is the author of the book. She had written one of the most influential books on marriage in the 20th century, which was entitled the Way We Never American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. That book was published in 1992 and Anna Louise Sussman, writing about the book, says that when the book was released, it landed like a gasoline soaked rag in the middle of that era's burning culture wars. End quote. Okay, so you know, that basically is true. And this is an argument that I've been brushing up against and confronting directly for the course of, I would say the last many decades, going all the way back, not only to 1992 when this book came out to before. One of the basic questions that has to be faced by any civilization is where marriage comes from. And you know, there are those who back in the 19th and 20th centuries were known as legal positivists and they meant that marriage didn't exist until the law defines marriage. The law created marriage. But of course the refutation of that is that when you actually get to the enactment of laws, even in ancient civilizations, the fact is they're recognizing what already exists. They're not just creating out of nothing something that never was. But you also see that there have been places and times in human experience when cultures and civilizations have gotten marriage wrong. You have experiments in polygamy and other kinds of arrangements like this. But the fact is that over time, successful civilizations have virtually uniformly found their way to the natural family. And I didn't say the nuclear family. More on that in a moment. But the natural family. This is the natural arrangement, a man and a woman and the household they create and the children who are born to them. Now, the reason I mention Stephanie Koontz in this new book is because what she writes now, and she's been doing this for decades, this is a culmination book, you might say, a book at the end of someone's career making a continued argument. She's been making the argument all along that you have to explain marriage in purely secular terms. And that means basically, in her view, in evolutionary terms. And so she sees marriage as an evolutionary product in terms of human social evolution. And by the way, biological evolution is at least a part of that. But she goes on to say that for definite needs, human beings came together to privilege a breeding pair. Now, how's that for a romantic understanding? And so you have this privileging and establishing of a breeding pair. She goes on to say, however, there's no such thing as traditional marriage. And, you know, this is one of the leading fictions of the left. I'm not going to say they're lying, because I think they're speaking an untruth, that they actually believe they've talked themselves into this. They want to say there never was something such as traditional marriage. But then they'll come back and say, okay, there was this model. There was this model. There was this model that is one of the efforts of the left to destabilize marriage. They say it never was one thing. In different generations and different cultures, there's been many different things. Well, there have been many different arrangements. But the bottom line is it pretty much has turned out to be one thing. And anyway, when she writes this book and the book that she wrote back in 1992, the way we Never Were, it eventuated in a lot of conversation. I had one conversation, I believe it was the network ABC in which I was in a studio with Stephanie Koontz. We were arguing two very different understandings of marriage and family. But in this time, she's come back with this latest book. Again, the title is For Better and Worse, the Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage. And I just looked at the book, I read the book, and here's what I want to tell you. If you hold to a secular understanding of all these things, you have to explain where marriage comes from. And if you tie yourself to a secular worldview, then you're going to speak of marriage coming out of social convenience and biological necessity. And then you can put, as Stephanie Koontz puts, marriage into a context of social evolution. And then you can simply say, there's not a right way and a wrong way. There's simply a different way, an adapted way to look at marriage. And of course, not only marriage, but childbearing, the family, and all the rest. Stephanie Koontz was herself basically a product of the 1960s and evergreen state University, where she taught. That's a very liberal school, and it's properly known, at least through most of that history, as Evergreen State College. Very, very liberal institution. And it's there in the Pacific Northwest, and it's been on the cutting edge of a lot of these leftist trends. But when you look at it, I'll tell you what I thought when I read her latest book. My first thought was this. If you're operating from a secular worldview and that's all you've got, you probably can't do much better than this. If you're just gonna look at human history and say, what do we learn from that history? You can then say, well, I guess what we learn is marriage can be whatever a pharaoh says it is, or an emperor says it is, or a king or a government says it is. But we understand as Christians, that's never been what marriage is. We understand that's never been what marriage is to be or where marriage came from. But you look at this and you understand there's always an agenda behind this. And the agenda in this case is very clear. It's coming from the radical 60s, and it's basically the argument that suppression of sexual urges and oppression in terms of a patriarchal society and all of this, it's just a context in which the fiction, she would say, of traditional marriage came to serve men, and it came to serve a conservative society. It has been used by forces on the right to try to make people conform to their own understanding of marriage. I just want to come back and say, I think it's important for Christians to see this kind of argument and understand that, yes, this is exactly what a lot of people on the left think, and it's not just an eccentric thought. Their worldview basically requires this. If you're not going to hold to an understanding of divine creation in terms of the origin of the cosmos, and if you think that human beings are just cosmic accidents, then marriage is just another cosmic accident. It can be defined this way here, that way there, or as we saw when we began the program today, individuals can just say, I'm going to determine it is whatever I want it to be. And so it is interesting to look at this and you recognize we are in a very interesting age. Now, speaking of an interesting age, I want to turn to another story. This one appeared in USA Today. It's an interesting report. The headline, support for same Sex marriage in the U.S. drops. Fernando Cervantes Jr. Is the reporter. And here's the bottom line of the story. Quote, more than a decade after the landmark Obergefell Supreme Court case legalized same sex marriage nationwide, support for such unions in the United States has fallen from record highs, according to a new Gallup poll. This Gallup poll came out released June 3, and it showed, quote, that after more than two decades of steady growth and advocacy for same sex marriage, the last couple of years has seen a decline in Americans support. Okay, so we're talking about down from 71% to 65%. And of course, all this is by social science polling. And so you give that whatever credibility you give it. But the point is, I think there is something going on here and I do think there is a decreasing support for same sex marriage. Now, that doesn't mean that same sex marriage is constitutionally threatened in terms of the Supreme Court. After the Obergefell decision, It took us 50 years to reverse the Roe decision. It may take us a similar number of years to reverse the Obergefell decision if the society lasts. But it is an indication of the fact that I think, you know, when you have this kind of popular support, when you have the media, let's just say Hollywood entertainment and all the celebrity culture and all the rest pushing the idea that same sex marriage can be a thing and that same sex marriage should be legal and that same sex relationships should be seen as equal to heterosexual married relationships, you have people who sign on to that. And I think we understand, given the moral revolutions in our society, how that works. People hear it, it's pushed upon them. It's pushed through employee meetings, it's pushed on college and university campuses. It's pushed on all the talking head programs. Well, guess what? Over a period of time, People begin to think about what they have been talking about and they realize, you know, I'm not quite as for that as I thought I was. Now, what you have here is the suggestion that this is social science regression. Okay? So in other words, proponents of same sex marriage say we are losing in terms of what is social support. I think it's more than that. I think as Christians, we need to understand it's more than that. If we really believe that marriage is a creation order institution, and as Christians, we do, then guess what? Creation order has a way of revealing itself. And so you have same sex couples, guess what they can't do together. They can't have babies together. If they're going to, quote, have a baby. The way they express it now, they have to use all kinds of assisted reproductive technologies, all kinds of complications. And then over time, guess what? A lot of Americans, just considering the situation and perhaps even looking more honestly at the situation, recognize that really isn't a good thing or that thing that at one point I said I would support. I don't support anymore. Let me tell you one of the most astounding facts about the moral revolution. The Obergefell decision came down in 2015. Ten years earlier, Americans overwhelmingly said that they opposed same sex marriage. By the time Obergefell came out, a majority of Americans, almost the same number, you could say 65, 35. Just as a rough approximation, if you go back to 2005, 65% of Americans said they didn't believe that same sex marriage should be legal. 35% said it should be legal. Ten years later, 65%, the situations flipped, say same sex marriage should be legal, 35% said it shouldn't be legal. Okay, here in terms of social science, is the astounding thing. In 10 years, let's just say that's less than a generation. Which means that some of the people who answered the question in 2005 changed their mind on such a fundamental question within 10 years when asked the same question in 2015. And as Christians, we need to look at that and ask ourselves, how could that happen? Well, it doesn't happen by sober, careful, cultural, theological analysis. It doesn't even happen by careful constitutional argument. It happens by popular pressure. It happens by the transformation of society. It happens by influences from the cultural elites, from entertainment and all the rest. But you know what? You can look at the issue of divorce. You can look at many questions related to marriage, you can look at many questions related to children and even some questions related to sex. And we still live in a society that at least at times has stunning moments of moral clarity when they understand we as a people understand okay, this is just not right. I think over time I'll make this prediction. I think over time an increasing number of Americans are going to say, what in the world were we thinking? What were we thinking when we said we supported same sex marriage? It's not a thing. And by the way, you can look at the evidence and say, you know, it is an expression of personal autonomy. It is an expression of moral individualism. It's not an expression of anything that actually helps to build society. Of course, Christians have a higher aim and aspiration than that. But we also understand that that which gives God glory also leads to maximum human flourishing. If no one else understands that, Christians must Thanks for listening to the briefing. For more information, go to my website@albertmuller.com youm can follow me on X or Twitter by going to x.comalbertmohler for information on the Southern Baptist Theological seminary, go to sbts.edu. for information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com I'm speaking to you from Orlando, Florida, where I'm at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, and I'll meet you again tomorrow for the briefing. Sam.